CNN.com: Information Visualization
Article

    A very *timely* article published on the heals of my "New Age
Navigation: Innovative Information
Interfaces for Electronic Journals" article in _ The Serials
Librarian_


[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf ]

   The Future *is* Now!

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Next-Generation Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

[log in to unmask]

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Better search results than Google? Next-generation sites help narrow
Internet searches
[
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/05/seeing.search1.ap/index.html
]

NEW YORK (AP) --As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they have
a pretty big flaw. They often deliver too much information, and a lot
of it isn't quite what we're looking for. Who really bothers to read
the dozens of pages of results that Google generates? Some intriguing
technologies are getting better at bringing order to all that chaos, and
 could revolutionize how people mine the Internet for information.

Software now emerging analyzes search results and automatically sorts
them into categories that, at a glance,
present far more information than the typical textual list. "We enliven
the otherwise deadening process of searching for information," said
Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder of Vivisimo Inc., [ http://vivisimo.com/ ]
which quickly puts search results into clickable categories.
Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo sells its technology to companies and
intelligence agencies, and offers free Web searches at Vivisimo.com.

[snip]

A similar process powers Grokker [http://www.groxis.com/service/grok/],
a downloadable program that not only sorts search results into
categories but also "maps" the results in a holistic way, showing each
category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear
as more circles that can be clicked on and zoomed in on.

[snip]

For example, Grokker2 can categorize and map files on your hard drive
-- arranging them by content,
not by the folders you happened to put them in -- or listings on
Amazon.com. If you use Grokker2 to search the Web, it combines results
from six search engines -- Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Wisenut, Teoma and
FAST, a business-focused product by a Norwegian company.

In 2004, Grokker plans to release up to two dozen downloadable plug-ins
that will set its colored circles loose on a wider variety of
databases, including the Library of Congress, news Web sites and yes,
Google itself.

[snip]

Google spokesman Nathan Tyler declined to comment on Groxis. Nor would
he say whether Google is exploring its own measures of sprucing up
search pages with categorization tools like Vivisimo or visualization
aids like Grokker.

Another visualization possibility is offered by TouchGraph LLC [
http://www.touchgraph.com/ ], which has a Google plug-in that shows
links as an interconnected web, an appropriate image for the World Wide
Web.

Such tools have been applied by the Manhattan firm Plumb Design in its
Visual Thesaurus
[ http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ ] which maps a word's meanings, or
in a navigation tool it developed for a Smithsonian Institution exhibit
 [ http://www.si.edu/revealingthings/ ]

[snip]

"Search has to evolve," Pittman said. "It can't just be Google sitting
there with a stash of places they've crawled on the Web. People are
becoming more astute and demanding better results, and they're demanding
a more powerful search experience. People like to get a landscape of
information once they've found out there's one available."


Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.