Grokker and Vivisimo: new ways to search
Wired News is running an article on new search paradigms. I went to check them out. Grokker sounds interesting (“..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…”) but the site seems to be struggling to cope with the spike in traffic it must be getting, as I couldn’t even get the page to resolve properly after a half a dozen tries. Vivisimo has an interesting concept. It puts the search results into clusters which appear in a left-hand task pane. This way, if you search on “Napoleon”, you can quickly see which of your results are books appearing at Amazon, which are history sites, which are ebay auctions, etc.