Wednesday, July 2, 2008

3. Use KartOO visual meta search engine

Play MP3 Play audio introduction for this task

KartOO is a visual search engine with an interface offers something a little extra. KartOO divides results into several categories, some serious, some not so serious.

The results are displayed in clusters using Flash and sheet of paper icons. Some results are more relevant than others, and clicking on an icon takes you to a deeper level of results. This might be a little confusing at first, but moving your mouse over a result produces a result summary at left, including a screenshot of the result page.

Your task

Do some images searches on KartOO.

Tell us what you think about it on your blog.

Further exploration

6 comments:

Kim said...

This is a search engine created by ex Google employees http://www.cuil.com/

I like the visual layout of the results.

TRR said...

Here is an article about Cuil and why it will not beat Google.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/29/4-ways-to-beat-google-at-search/

TRR said...

You may be interested in the Powerset search engine, which Microsoft is about to acquire in an attempt to gain market share against Google.

In the words of Wikipedia, "Powerset is working on building a search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form 'which U.S. state has the highest income tax?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords 'state, income and tax'. Powerset's product, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question."

You can try out the Powerset search engine now. At the very least, it has a better name than Cuil.

TRR said...

A search on Powerset for the words "what happens when you put a light globe in a microwave?" results in absolutely nothing relevant to my search. There are results about all sorts of things from the speed of light to the big bang theory, which are interesting but unrelated to my search.

A search for the same words on Google results in all of the first 8 results being relevant to my search, with the next few results about other interesting things like putting aluminium foil in the microwave, and more.

So, Google is still significantly better even for thing lengthy natural language question.

It is no Google killer.

macca said...

I liked KartOO - can go into great depth

macca said...

The layout of KatOO is good - easy to go into depth