Last week, in our final installment of the Cascading Style Sheet, Dynamic HTML and JavaScript saga we made a small typo: When we discussed the value “!important” we showed “p {font-weight: normal ! important;}” as an example. That should have read “…normal !important;}” – that is, there shouldn’t have been a space between the exclamation point and the word “important.” Trivial we know, but that could well save you a major headache and the trouble of writing to us about the error of our ways.
First up this week, we want to point you to a real-world use for a product we talked about a few weeks ago. The product is Xcelsius from Infommersion and the real-world use is an updated and reformatted version of Gibbs’ spam cost spreadsheet.
This is a great example of using Xcelsius to deliver a powerful picture of complex underlying data, and if you attend the Network World Technology Tour event, Messaging and Spam: From Chaos to Control, you can hear about the thinking and technologies that provide the model’s background.
Which brings us to this week’s topic: Web search overload and how to search better. With Google alone indexing about 4.3 billion pages out of an estimated 9 billion pages, any reasonably popular topic you are researching will return more hits than you can easily deal with (for example, a search for “getting rid of ants” returned 34,500 hits). To make any sense of this deluge of data you need help.
So we turn to a browser add-on from Groxis called Grokker2, a visual navigation tool that provides an interface for Web searches.
Let us digress and explain that the name Grokker comes from the invented term “to grok,” which first appeared in Stranger in a Strange Land , a science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. According to Heinlein, “to grok” means “to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself.”
The power of Grokker2 lies in its ability to automatically organize search results and present them graphically to make it easier to home in on groups of relevant results and ignore everything else.
Grokker2 groups search results in a hierarchy of containers represented by circles or squares (you can choose which you prefer). The outer containers are more general than inner containers. The circle-based representation is visually appealing and watching Grokker2 build an image is rather like watching some kind of a colonial protozoan reproducing under a microscope.
Clicking in a category (shown by a circle or square) zooms in to show the items that can be sub-categories or URLs (sub-categories and URLs can be in multiple categories). Clicking outside a category zooms you out to the level above.
The presentation is color-coded and you can filter for specific text, by ranking, by domain (such as commercial, network or nonprofit – this depends on the domains that Grokker2 identifies), and/or by source (individual search services).
The search results are collected from “the Web” (a selection of general search engines, including MSN, AltaVista, Teoma, Fast, WiseNut and Yahoo), Google, Amazon or your local files (which rely on the Windows indexing service).
The default Grokker2 interface consists of two main panes: the Zooming Space, which displays the graphical presentation of the search results, and the Browsing Space, an embedded Internet Explorer control that displays the currently selected result in the Zoom Space.
At the top of these these panes are controls in which you enter search terms and configure the presentation and filters to constrain the results at the bottom. You also can have Grokker2 display just the Zoom Space or just the Browsing Space and optionally hide or show the filters and controls.
Grokker2’s presentation of search results is extremely effective, providing an efficient way to focus on useful results. It lives up to the concept of “grokking” very well. Our only complaints are that the product uses up an enormous amount of memory (80M to 130M bytes, depending on the size of the search results) and lots of CPU time to organize the results. Grokker2 also doesn’t support any kind of export or printing of results, but the company has announced a Professional version, due later this year, so maybe our wishes will be granted. Or grokked.
Deep understanding to gearhead@gibbs. com.
