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., 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. Valdes-Perez describes his company this way: If the Internet is a
giant bookstore in which all the books are piled randomly on the floor, then
Vivisimo is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on
shelves in a way that makes sense. Consider it a 21st century Dewey Decimal System designed to fight
information overload. But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined
categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search
results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical
analysis, a method that even works with other languages. A similar process powers Grokker, 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. It takes a few minutes to get used to Grokker. But the value of
its nonlinear approach quickly becomes clear. Let's say, for example, you're curious about accommodations in Google recognizes this as a search in the category of
"Regional-Europe-Travel and Tourism-Lodging-Hotels" but still
produces page after page with links about celebrity socialite Paris Hilton and
her exploits. That's because Google's engine ranks pages largely based on how many
other sites link to them, sending the most popular pages to the top.
If you run the search on Grokker, however, the resulting circle
shows all the possible categories of information the Internet offers on a
search for "Paris Hilton" -- including reviews, maps and online
booking sites for the Hilton hotel in Paris, which are all but buried in the
Google rankings. Now you've much more quickly found not what is popular among Internet
gawkers, but what is genuinely useful to you. Groxis Inc., the 15-person company that introduced Grokker last
year and released an upgraded, $49 second version in December, is not out to
replace Google. Grokker is not in itself a search engine -- it only analyzes
and illustrates search engines' results. 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. "We now have the capability to 'grok' anything," said
R.J. Pittman, chief executive of Sausalito, California-based Groxis. Would-be
Grokkers, a note of caution: it requires Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X. The Google plug-in is partly a market test; Google and Groxis will
analyze how well it works and then consider whether to work on developing a
service together, Pittman said. 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,
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 Meanwhile, a number of search sites have gotten hip to honing
results. For example Teoma, which is part of Ask Jeeves Inc., suggests ways
to refine or narrow a search. That means a Teoma search for " "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." Jen -- |
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