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Search Engine Using Interactive Topic Map

posted by Editor on Wednesday June 12, @02:00PM

Kartoo is a meta-search engine that presents results with an interactive topic map based on Macromedia Flash. When you launch a search, Kartoo analyses the request and submits queries to multiple search engines. It then selects the best sites and shows them on an information graph of balls, representing key sites. The balls are linked by lines, representing topic areas (see screenshot). When you move the pointer over a ball, the description of the site is displayed, which you click on to open the site. When you move the pointer over a line representing a topic, buttons for zooming in and out appear. These can be used to drill down to more sites for that topic (zooming in adds the topic to the search, while zooming out eliminates the sites relative to this topic). You can save or transmit a map, so that you or another user can start the search again later, from where you left it, and can update it or widen it. Kartoo was featured on Slashdot a few weeks ago, which produced some useful comments.

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You might also like the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser (Score:1)

by alex_s on Saturday June 15, @01:36AM EST (#1)
(User #221 Info)

Kartoo is a pretty cool app.

You might also be interested in the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which is a java applet that can visualize Google's similar pages (notice the "similar pages" link next to every google search result). Here is a NY Times ScreenShot and a Hewlett Packard ScreenShot which show graphs that you get by starting with www.nytimes.com and www.hp.com respectively.

Kartoo is interesting because it labels the relationships between websites, and lets you use them to narrow your search. The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser is not that sophisticated. However the TGGoogleBrowser has the advantage of showing a much bigger picture, with the ability to display over 200 sites at a time. This can be useful for getting the "big picture" about a particular field of interest, the nytimes and hp examples being demos of displaying "major publications", and "technology companies".

You might also be interested in trying Cristian Langreiter's TG-Based Google Sets Browser The great thing about it is that it can be used on concepts and not just websites. For instance here is a screenshot of a map of philosophers which it was used to generate.

--Alex
www.touchgraph.com

I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth. -- Fry