Kartoo Search Engine Presents Results as a Map 279
cdupree writes "I've just run across a search engine called Kartoo---anyone else know it? Apparently it's been up since April 25. It presents its results in a graphical fashion, sort of like a map, allowing you to refine your query interactively. Admittedly, the "working" picture is a bit dorky, but the site is not dripping with ads (except for itself), and it's interesting to see the connections it finds when you enter, for example, "slashdot." My initial take on the thing is, it looks pretty, it presents the standard information in a new and different manner, but I haven't used it enough to get much in-depth knowledge of how best to use it. Has anyone had experience with this method of presenting search results? Is there background available on the folks who produced it beyond the trivial amount on the web site?" This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results. Update: 05/28 14:29 GMT by T : Laurent Baleydier adds: "Since last night, kartoo's requests have been multiplied by 20. At this moment, we can't respond to all those
requests. We really apologize and we are doing as fast as possible in order to give you the best services."
Pretty Neat (Score:2)
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:1)
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:2)
I've been aching for a search engine that works kind of like this. I'm not sure of KartOO quite works the way I'm hoping it will (hard to tell when it's Slashdotted...), but it's a good start.
I really hope that somebody'll develop a file browser for Windows kind of like this. I think I'd work a hell of a lot faster if my hard drive looked like a star-map instead of climbing a tree.
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:2)
Load Testing (Score:2)
So much for load testing - Did anyone give them a heads up? At least there should be someone on duty since France, etc does not have a Memorial Day, at least not on the USA schedule of holidays.
Looks like it is back to Ask Taco [asktaco.com] for me
;-)
Interesting results... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people have been complaining about the slow response compared to google, and so on. Well let's not worry about that right now, let's look at what it does do interesting.
Google is used for very specific searches, and Kartoo doesn't really change that. Instead, I used Kartoo to do a general search. I typed in "Robocop'. Here is the link:
http://www.kartoo.com/kartoo2/servlet/H?q=robocop
Notice it shows a few sites, and even a few words giving you hints about what the site is about. I think this is where some people had some trouble, though. This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
It's pretty cool that at a glance I know what that site is going to show me before I actually read it's description when I move my mouse over it. Right away, without having to read much at all, I knew that I could find pictures of Robocop, information about the movies, and even a hint that there was a series to Robocop.
This is where the speed comes. Google is fast and all, but I've never found info this fast on a general topic such as "Robocop".
Go try it out! You'll see what I mean. I don't know if this particular site will become popular, but I do think that it proves that the graphical search enging concept is viable and interesting. I'd still use Google for very specific questions I have, but if I wanted to know about general topics, this would be a very handy place to look
Re:Interesting results... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ask me, the site's not ready for prime time, and it's damn sure not load-balanced well enough to withstand the
Re:Interesting results... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting results... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting results... (Score:2)
Worked wonderfully for me using Opera 6.01 under WinXP, and Opera 6.0 under Linux. No IE here
Re:Interesting results... (Score:2)
Porn? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Porn? (Score:5, Funny)
Got 1 search in (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Got 1 search in (Score:2, Funny)
Fun, but no Google (Score:1)
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:3, Interesting)
That'd be a fun project!
*wishes he had a star-map-like File Explorer for Windows*
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:2)
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea what's wrong with KartOO. There are two possiblities: 1.) they're using a crappy hack to get the data from the search engine (which could be the case if Flash doesn't have a way of getting HTTP data down...) or 2.) Slashdot kicked it's butt.
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:2)
Unless this was written in Flash MX, the data transfer method is complete ass. Massive query string, anyone?
If it is Flash MX, then it's probably some massive hack using Flash MX, ColdFusion MX, JRun, MS SQL Server, and a hampster.
Of course, having the biggest DoS provider on the public Internet hand you your ass doesn't help matters any.
An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:5, Insightful)
I commend them on creating an original and refreshingly different idea in search engines, but I doubt Google has anything to worry about.
At least they run Linux [netcraft.com]
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2, Insightful)
The search engine sucks. It's not a
Your inability to use a browser is also not a
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
I think the reason they don't is that they dump the raw post onto the screen without parsing it. If Slashdot worked like sites using VBulletin or UBB, then it'd parse the post and look for 'http://' and automatically draw the link for us.
At that point, it'd be trivial to have each user set a flag that defines whether or not a new window opens.
I'd love it if Slashdot were to do this, but I can see it being a bit of a pain for both the authors and the users. How many of us are used to typing 'a href ='....?
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
The flaw in that comment is that when you make something easier to use, you're improving productivity. If you are the type of person who has a habit of visiting a site and then coming back to slashdot, then there's no reason for them not to accomodate your taste. Hell, I have a damn good reason they should follow your suggestion: Posts change! If you hit back and the page reloads, you'll find yourself looking at a different post.
Nice, eh? Heh.
Needless to say, I agree with you.
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
Is it trivial? Perhaps. Is it worth getting shitty with somebody? No. It's not the type of thing where I'd say "I hate Slashdot because they won't set the link to open new windows...". It's more like "It'd be nice if Slashdot did do this..."
If I got treated like that for a simple request like that, I'd be fumin too.
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
And yes, you're right about the parsing, I hadn't noticed that. Too bad you had to hide like a coward.
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
Wow, I've never met a graduate from the Bob Saget School of Comedy before.
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
"Oh, so you're the twit, not the other guy. If Slashdot doesn't parse it, then where does the bracketed domain insert come from? Magic fairies? "
If so, that was rather unnecessary. I mean you basically called me a twit because I didn't notice something which, by default, isn't enabled. It would have been fine for ya to say "Actually, Slashdot does parse, the evidence is when...".
See what I mean?
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
Let me explain something to you: I am aware of the domain name bit you mentioned only because I turned it on at some point. And yes, that was a startling clue that what I said was in error. However, you had no way of knowing that when you got shitty with me.
I made a factual error, I acknowledge that, but YOU didn't take a moment's thought to ask yourself if I had turned that particular feature on. So by your own definition, you are a bigger twit than I am for making assumptions about what I had to work with.
Re:An incredibly obnoxious search engine. (Score:2)
You sure about that? Yes, I didn't check into it. If IM wrong, your right. The end. Im pretty sure I turned it on.
*Shrug*
Even if I am a *Twit* I don't think it's going to affect my mood much.
Okay, you win. (Score:2)
There's still no need for you to be hostile. I was wrong, but I don't feel that the original post I made deserved such a harsh reaction. (Though I *do* deserve the latest one, hehe)
So can we move on pls?
Re:Okay, you win. (Score:2)
I achieved twit status on that one too.
Northern Light? (Score:1)
My results (Score:5, Informative)
Needless to say, I'm already not a fan of the site. Perhaps in time it will prove to be more usable.
Re:My results (Score:2)
Interesting, but it's no google (Score:1)
We Killed it (Score:1)
The relevant results are due to.. (Score:2, Funny)
It takes forever (Score:3, Funny)
inevitable slashdotting.... (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming it'll be slashdotted, for the curious, what it does is something like a graphical Alexa. It shows the main thing you searched for as a sort of you-are-here dot that you can click on, and then it shows related sites and keywords in a connect-the-dots type of image. So I entered slashdot, and got slashdot.org as the main result, but with "linux" and some other keywords around it. I clicked "linux" and got a new graphic with some linux sites, OSDN, and some other related stuff.
It does seem useful, but on Windows, I'd rather just click the "Related" button in IE and get Alexa's list. Here on my Linux box, this is a good substitute for Opera and Konq to use.
Re:inevitable slashdotting.... (Score:2)
Have you ever seen Google get slashdotted? if anything, Goggle's cached links get used as a mirror for sites that get slashdotted. Alexa's list is powered by google too.
Slashdotted a search engine... heh.
Grat Search Engine!!! (Score:1)
Hmm. (Score:1)
it's a meta crawler, not an indexer... (Score:5, Informative)
The Flash version is a bit slow, even on huge pipes and a faster client.
Damn (Score:2)
Relevant Results? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.
Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I searched for my nickname and found the results kind of interesting. Not really anything to write home about, but I got to go down a lot of different paths. The map was the same time every time I entered my nick, so if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I'd remember which area of the map I was on and try a different one.
If you're looking for a few fan sites on the Transformers, for example, I can see the visual metaphor being quite useful compared to Google's "we'll list them in order." technique.
Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense or not, but I'm starting to get the idea how a visual cue like this could be quite constructive in hunting down hard-to-find info.
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:2)
Could be interesting, certain routes could become major highways, and sites which have major highways connected to them could be ranked higher...
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:2)
It'd also be cool if the map were more radial so certain types of pages are in one corner, and different ones on the other... that way you could pick a compass direction to scan in.
Wouldnt that be cool?
More then Google (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:2)
I wonder if this is of interest to that "big prize for an interesting use of google data" project, because it certainly seems useful.
As for the "many javascript dialogs" problem, it looks like they're checking for "Browser version < 4" and then for "Is browser Internet Explorer?", so goodness knows what it thinks Mozilla is... I'm sure they'll figure something out after being hit with a slew of linux browsers from Slashdot readers...
Done right? (Score:2)
I tried installing it as user and it failed since it didn't have permission to write to the proper directories/files. It then told me to fix the problem by giving everyone read/write access to
Re:Done right? (Score:2)
A better solution for a multi-user system is to give your user's group access to
I hope you enjoy the toolbar!
yup (Score:2)
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:2)
Apparently... (Score:2, Funny)
Well, good thing you posted it on Slashdot. Everyone site should go down at least once ever 3 months.
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Can't quite see the point of it myself. I like a ranked list, like Google.
Re:Mirror (Score:2)
Actually we've now officially killed [slashdot.org] Search Engines (plural) if you count beta [google.com] sites...which this one pretty much seems to be.
Thanks for the mirror.
Do not try in recent mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
Bad first impression.
Frankly I think it should have warned me about needing javascript or similar stupid shit. I wouldn't have bothered.
Go google.
DMCA (Score:4, Funny)
What the hell is that green thing in his face? (Score:2)
Problem... (Score:2)
It sat there for 40 seconds counting away the seconds and then told me:
"the connection with kartoo failed. If the problem persists, you can send us a message on kartoo@kartoo.com and we will try to find a solution:-)"
Maybe it didn't like my firewall? maybe javascript is mandatory? Maybe it's just slashdotted?
Whatever the reason, I see little use for a search engine that doesn't work -- regardless of how pretty the graphics are
dancing llamas (Score:4, Insightful)
Back 'in the day' Altavista and Yahoo did it right: focus on searching and that's all. If i go to the library to find a book i don't need to look at a dancing llama for 10 seconds before i enter, it's just useless and flagrant.
Now, though, we have Google, which has realized what makes a search engine useful, and look at it: it's the most popular on the internet.
A way around the slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
KartOO HTML [kartoo.com]
Look but don't touch, though, at least in Moz RC3. If you mouse-over one of the links in the map, it'll bomb you with a series of java alerts.
Sweat
Re:A way around the slashdotting (Score:2)
They're gonna have to do a lot to clean it up (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but every section of the website that is supposed to have some feature (search bar for your web page, screensaver, startpage, etc.) has something completely different in it. Like for instance the "put kartoo in your startpage" results in "email your friends about kartoo". And "install kartoo on your website" results in simply link logos. "screensaver" results in desktop backgrounds.
I applaud what these guys are trying to do, but it looks to me like they have been focusing on things other than achieving their goal.
screenshot (Score:2)
Some experience (Score:4, Interesting)
It was pretty interesting, the program was similar to the interface to Chime for chemistry, you could zoom in and out and rotate the link structure. I'm not sure what the result of the research was, and I'd say it was a toss up as to whether it was easier to use or not.
Maybe the CS grad student that did the research reads slashdot and he can tell us how it turned out.
Generating Images (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure if you put in enough effort you could draw pictures [nfrance.com]
of course slash-code f's with the URL so here's an smlnk: (ps. smlnk.com shortens URLs mostly for usenet or irc postings so don't be freaked out be the redirect)
http://smlnk.com/?EPRZ4J7R [smlnk.com]
Re:Generating Images (Score:2)
Cute trick, but
Alta Vista's been there, done that (Score:2)
a better site (Score:2)
LINK TO KARTOO POSTED ON SLASHDOT (Score:2)
doesn't work for me (Score:2)
Wow, depending on which browser I use, it looks either like a screenful of JAVASCRIPT ALERTS or the KDE bomb (Konquerer dying with a segfault).
score: F+
Don't Take Control of My Browser (Score:2)
The search engine was slashdotted, no big surprise there. But the thing that will keep me from ever visiting this site again is that when I repeated clicked the Back button and hit Alt-Left, I kept getting their page. Anybody who pulls that lame crap to keep people from backing out of their site SUCKS DONKEY.
Had a good play a few days ago (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd been waiting for somebody to try something genuinely useful with Flash for a while, at least useful beyond providing something to hide behind when you haven't got any real content, and while Kartoo is nice enough to now be near the top of my five miles of mostly unsorted bookmarks, one side of me wishes that they'd waited for SVG to be a bit more available.
Maybe I was lucky in my first choice, but I opted for "complexity nonlinear emergence" and was richly rewarded. The visual presentation of results and associated keywords seemed like a significant step forward and led me to a bunch of useful cross disciplinary sites that I haven't had a chance to more than skim yet.
It has been interesting to compare Kartoo with Google Sets [slashdot.org] that was discussed here last week. Both are novel approaches to situating search items in context, but at least for "complexity nonlinear emergence" Google Sets is singularly unhelpful.
Self-Organizing Maps (Score:2)
Obviously there are many different ways to do this, for example, use other criteria such as noun phrases instead of words, and there are lots of variations within just this particular implementation. I can't actually see what Kartoo is doing because the site isn't working for me, but I suspect it's something similar -- I think the 'Topics' is for example the word or phrase category map and the 'Sites' is the document map.
This not new (Score:2)
Apparently it's been up since April 25 (Score:2)
Is it really true that Slashdot only just realised this kind of thing has been quietly adding extra time to your searches to give you some flash graphical map?
time waster.... (Score:2, Informative)
Dynamic clustering ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the first full web search tool to display results using dynamic clustering ?
I only had a brief play with the non-clustering version prior to
and thought it summarised the options very well. The speed wasn't great but not too bad either for the work I think it was doing. If they can work on scalability a bit more perhaps they'll have something.
A while ago I implemented a dynamic clustering search/refine system based on a Xerox PARC idea called "Scatter-Gather". Potentially, it gives good results, but since clustering is naturally
an O(n^2) operation, you need to find shortcuts to make it quick enough.
Clustering is finding groups of documents in a collection which interrelate more to each other than to the other documents. e.g. the results for "chocolate cake" would hopefully partition into cake recipes, cake shops, cake mix, diet tips, chocolate appreciation societies etc etc..
From what I've seen, my guess is that with clustering off (the default) it's doing some sort of pseudo-clustering a bit like this:
* Starts with an indexing search engine's results.
* Re-indexes these or their summaries, binning the usual stop words like pronouns and weighting by frequency in the sub-collection.
* Picks some distinctive/distant vectors, i.e
documents which contain few overlaps with each other.( picking a few samples O(nlogn) ? )
* Labels them with their distinctive terms and displays.
* Allows the initial "Google" search to be refined +/- these terms.
With clustering on, I'd guess the main differences to be in the document sampling and query refinement. I'll take another look in a couple of days time. Has anyone tried it out ?
Clustering is expensive, but I still think it's a useful tool for presenting and refining results. This is the best example I've seen so far. The graphical presentation feels fairly natural and intuitive.
It would be a nice option to have on Google to say "cluster my results", when you notice there are distinct classes of result you want to isolate. I'd wait 30s for that.
Colin
They've been multiplicated (Score:2)
You don't really want it... (Score:2)
One of this days, somebody will find the right way to display search results graphically, but so far all of those that I've seen fell well short of the standard ranked summary list presented by Google.
Re:Flash? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it ever occur to you that Flash isn't the cause of your annoyance, it's the people who make the flash movies? Attack of the Clones sucked, but don't blame Digital Film for it.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
The technology as such doesn't annoy me, but I do consider it completely useless. Everything I need can be done in plain HTML.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
I'll give you a really simple example: One of my biggest annoyances with the web is that every single page has to take a few seconds to connect, once it does the info comes down quickly. I'd prefer if I could download all the data from the site (connect once and then burst it down...) and then view it rapidly.
Flash allows you to do this. You have one download, and then you set up flash to click through the relevant information. No need for fancy graphics (though you could if you wish...), and you can make the page smoothly scale to whatever resolution you want. I'd really like to be able take Slashdot, for example, and scale it up a bit so I can read the text better.
Anyhoo.. I know I won't change your mind about it, I just wanted to offer a potential for Flash that would be incredibly useful if anybody used it properly.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
How would this differ from HTTP/1.1, which can also connect once and then download everything through the same connection?
Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
Because even with HTTP 1.1, you'll download one page from a site, and when you go to the next one you have to reconnect and have the new data come down. With Flash, it is possible to encapsulate the entire site into one Flash file and fire it down. There may be javascript tricks you could do with HTML too, now that I think about it.\
"Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text."
No, you can make the fonts bigger and smaller, you can't scale them.
If you're an Opera User, then you do have that ability. They have a zoom tool where you can put in a percentage and it'll scale the site, images and all. The downside, though, is that they don't do any image processing to make the effect smoother. FLash can.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
HTTP/1.1 allows you to keep a connection open until a timeout expires, but anyway, your suggestion sounds like solving a problem with the transport layer in the content layer. If there is a problem with the performance of HTTP, it should IMHO be solved by rectifying HTTP.
Since we're comparing technologies, not implementations, you'll surely agree that there is nothing inherent in the technology of HTML that prevents scaling.
That said, the ability of Mozilla to scale all text (but not the images) and to specify a minimum font size is sufficient for me. YMMV, of course.
Re: Flash is useless (Score:2)
Explain please?
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
I removed Macromedia software when all the flash control vanished due to some over ambitious advertisers. When a right click on an ad produced nothing but "About Macromedia" and ads started covering up content and moving over the pages, was the straw that convinced me the player was totaly out of control.
That was the day Macromedia software was uninstalled. Does anybody know of a flash player that has controls that can't be disabled by the advertiser?
A player that came up like Winamp Media player with a full set of controls would be nice.
Required, the X button in the corner of the player must not be overridden. Un-stoppable software need not apply.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
:P
In all seriousness, I understand the complaints about flash, heck it annoys me too. But I don't blame Flash or Macromedia, just the crappy use of it. This is the second time I've seen a practical use of it. The first time was when a friend of mine created a statistic site using Flash to do the fancy graphic work.
I think sites that use Flash are generally pretty annoying, but as I said, the technology isn't the problem. It's the people who think they need to create a teaser for their site who are creating the problem.
Re:Flash? (Score:2)
Re:useless (Score:2, Funny)
Did this post leave anybody else aching for a more sophisticated opinion?
Re:useless (Score:2)
Re:Great job guys... (Score:2, Informative)