Search Engines, Visualization, and KartOO

By O’Leary, Mick

Database Review A lot more was happening back in the old days, when search engines were first emerging. It seemed that every few months some new search engine came along that was radically different from all the others, and it shook up the status quo.

You may remember hotBot, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, and many others. None of them could hold a lead for long, and the title of Best Search Engine was regularly passed from one to another. In the industry, the main discussion was how to manipulate your page content and metadata to gain optimum search engine placement.

Then, Google came along and soon quieted the turmoil. There is no more jostling for the Best Search Engine title, because Google has a lock on it. Google’s eminence is deserved, because its PageRank search technology was a breakthrough, and it generally performs better than the programs that preceded it. Google’s distant competitors-Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, and Ask.com-pay Google the ultimate compliment by imitating it. They all use a variation of Google’s search technology, so much so that, for a given search, the results among all four will overlap considerably. This is especially true in the top 10 or 20 hits, which are the only ones you look at anyway.

Even so, Google remains on top by a wide margin for three reasons. First, the Google brand is dominant; it’s one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and brand recognition is a strong attractant. Second, Google has developed many successful specialty search engines; the list is too long and too familiar to name. And finally, as a result of thousands of comparison searches over the past few years, I conclude that Google does perform slightly better than the others, similarities notwithstanding.

Same Data, New Looks

So, what’s a marginal search engine to do? If you can’t beat Google at its own game, then try a different game. If your basic search results aren’t better than Google’s, then you can make your search results presentation better.

Ask.com has been the most active player in this game. As part of its major makeover from Ask Jeeves, it added a highly useful search Narrow/ Expand feature that automatically displays a set of related search queries that helps you delve into different aspects of your topic. Recently, Ask.com added another new display feature by showing the top hits from different content types: On the first search results page, you receive-in addition to the top Web page hits-the top hits for images, videos, blogs, etc. The intent is to provide you with all of the top Web content at once, instead of running consecutive searches for different content types. Ask.com is making a big deal about this, even as far as running ads on network TV. The ads don’t work because computer screen shots don’t show up well on a TV screen, but this ad strategy indicates how seriously Ask.com is taking its new results display methods.

Ask.com’s strategy seems to be working, but perhaps not in the way that it expected. Google, Yahoo!, and Windows Live Search are now displaying related search queries alongside their hit lists. In May, Google announced its Universal Search, with typical grandiosity, which will imitate Ask.com in displaying multiple content types. Google has started to do this, but slowly. Perhaps Google is finding it difficult to imitate Ask.com’s technology.

Maps, Not Words

Of course, these adventures in search results display are modest compared to what is provided by the “visualization” search engines, such as Grokker (see Database Review in the October 2005 IT) and Quintura. These are quite different from the conventional list of page addresses that the mainstream search engines provide. They use highly creative visual displays to represent the conceptual relationships among aspects of a complex topic.

Almost anything seems drab compared to the visual pyrotechnics of KartOO (www.kartoo.com). (At this point, you should move to a computer and take a look at KartOO for yourself, since words alone don’t give the full effect.) KartOO’s visual model is a map, and the search engine is an attempt to replicate the experience of looking at a map, but one with moving parts. It helps to know that KartOO’s basic business is visualization technology. The French company was founded in 2001 to develop visualization products for managing and interpreting many kinds of data. It has a suite of products for enterprise markets, all using a variety of ingenious maplike presentations.

KartOO’s underlying search technology is ordinary. It bills itself as a metasearch engine that covers nine individual search engines. In practice, however, most hits come from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, and AltaVista. Thus, KartOO search results themselves are unexceptional, but their display is dazzling. Hits are displayed on a maplike field as miniature Web pages. Relevance is indicated by page size, with more relevant pages shown larger. Pages that are close in content are positioned closer to each other. Other maplike elements, including lines (roads) and patterns (topography) also demonstrate page relationships. When you mouse over a page icon, it is displayed as a thumbnail in a side frame, along with related search queries. It’s elegant, but is it a killer app?

Games, Not Words

The same question applies to yet another KartOO specialty search engine: UJIKO (www.ujiko.com). The design inspiration for UJIKO is a video game. It has a search screen unlike any you’ve seen before, with flashy graphics and lots of interactivity. It even has levels that give you additional options after you’ve viewed a certain number of pages. UJIKO differs from KartOO in one other major respect: A search refinement option uses a “more like this” feature that refines the search based on the content of a relevant page. Otherwise, UJIKO uses KartOO’s basic search technology so you’ll get predictable results, even if fancily wrapped.

Next for Search?

KartOO and UJIKO have remarkable production values, but what about the bottom line? Usage of each is so low that it’s almost off the bottom of the chart (check out Alexa at www.alexa.com if you want to see the actual data). So, what’s the point of spending time considering them? They are clever and fascinating, and there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun sometimes. There’s also a practical reason: They just might be a glimpse into the future of search engines.

Even though we are in a placid time of Google’s search engine dominance-a “Pax Googlianus”-things can change, as we are seeing from the rapid spread of features like “Narrow/Expand” and multiple content type display. Yes, visual search engines like Grokker, KartOO, and others have been around for a while and haven’t been widely adopted, but it’s perilous to predict the future of the Internet. Who foresaw the popularity of MySpace, YouTube, or Wikipedia? So, take some time to play with KartOO and UJIKO, and justify it as professional development in emerging Internet applications.

Search Engines, Visualization, and KartOO

SYNOPSIS

KartOO and UJIKO are innovative search engines that use creative visual techniques to display search results. Search results are obtained from common search engines and do not contain any distinctive content. The visual display techniques are intended to provide more intuitive and productive ways to interpret the results.

PRODUCER

KartOO S.A. 8 allee Evariste Galois, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France; www.kartoo.com.

Even though we are in a placid time of Google’s search engine dominance-a ‘Pax Googlianus’-things can change….

Mick O’Leary is the director of the library at Frederick, Md., and a principal in The Data Brokers. His email address is harmonyrd@yahoo.com,. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.

Copyright Information Today, Inc. Nov 2007

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