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                          Visualizing search results

Ken sent me this link to the Kart00 Metasearch engine. [1] It uses Flash to
an almost pathological extreme, but you can choose the HTML (HyperText Markup
Language) interface (and be careful—once you choose, there doesn't seem to be
a way to change short of removing any cookies you have for their domain).

It is an interesting concept and I think I know what they're doing. When you
do a search (and yes, the Flash interface is nicer; the HTML interface
crashed Mozilla 0.9.9 in an endless series of message boxes) the result is a
graph of the results. The size of a node (search result) is apparently
directly proportional to the relevance of the search, and the connections
between the nodes (the edges) are similar terms between the two pages.

For instance, I did a search for “sean spc conner” and the two largest
results (one for www.classiccmp.org [2] and www.conman.org [3]) are linked by
the terms “captain” and “napalm” (wonder why?). You can also remove terms
from a list on the side.

All in all, it is an interesting view into search results and the ability to
remove terms is quite nice (and can give dramatic changes—for instance, I
removed the terms “captain” and “napalm” and the resulting graph was
completely different with no one node dominating and the big result from the
last search, www.conman.org [4] isolated and not connected to any other
node).

[1] http://www.kartoo.com/
[2] http://www.classiccmp.org/mail-archive/classiccmp/2000-02/0287.html
[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/

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