Visual Search Engines – Second Part.
Part 1 talks about search engines that show snippets of web pages as screenshots(3D Search). This part covers 3 search engines that offer different search result layout styles.
Quintra
Perhaps the most useful of all visual search engines reviewed.
Quintra gives semantic keyword information for each keyword query. Clicking on one narrows search results.
Quintra is useful if you’re entering into a new field and want to have a feel for keywords and semantically related phrases. Search results are provided by Yahoo.
I could see Quintura coming in handy in certain contexts. If you’re trying to brainstorm for keywords, this isn’t a bad place to experiment. If you’re new to search or trying to teach someone how to search on the Internet, showing them how to use Quintura could help, especially if they’re somewhat visually oriented; it might help them think of ways to make their search more specific, seeing that word cloud. If you’re stuck on a query at a different search engine and want to refine your approach, using Quintura’s search cloud could help reorient your thinking a little. Certainly, if you’ve been very frustrated with regular search engines, Quintura may be worth a try. But as an experienced web searcher, Quintura didn’t show me anything to make me want to switch from the search engine(s) I use every day. - SEO Chat.
Kartoo Review
Kartoo was co-founded in France by two cousins, Laurent and Nicholas Baleydier. It’s a meta search engine, meaning it gathers results from other search engines.
Features:
It’s hard to describe Katoo’s search interface, so here’s a screenshot.
On hover Kartoo shows relationships between websites in form of green connectors. Are those links? No idea, so users are left clueless. On the left side Kartoo gives website description, along with advertisements.
You can also refine search by topics. Clicking on a topic simply adds more keywords to the search.
Biggest problem with Kartoo, as with other visual search engines is lack of information about websites. Although you get short descriptions on hover, you have to hover over each result to see all of them. Worse, you can’t compare them against each other, since by the time you hover over a new site, new description takes place over the old one. Tricky if you want to compare 10 sites.
Kartoo also has classic meta search found here.
Grokker Overview
Another useful visual search engine. Useful from search marketing perspective. Each search query on Grokker produces following suggested sub keyword categories:
You can drill into each subsection and explore real keyword relationships in a specific industry.
Grokker can help you visualize keyword importance and importance of information to specific users. For example, our search for “mortgage” returned phrases like: “Security for a loan”, “Compare Mortgage” and “Law of Property Act” – information that users may want to find on a website.
Search results come from Yahoo. Other features listed by Grokker:
- Viewing Options – Explore your Grokker results in the familiar zoomable map or in the Outline view.
- Federated Search – Simultaneous search across Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Amazon Books. Enterprise versions of Grokker include even more sources.
- Powerful filters including an exclude option for keywords, a date slider, and more.
- Email option to share Grokker results without having to create and attach a file.
- Export results in a number of different formats including RSS feeds.
- Post, email or bookmark individual results.
- A Working List feature that allows you to save results from multiple queries
Conclusion
Kartoo, Quintra, and Grokker are more user friendly and useful than 3d visual search engines. You can actually find web results and use those search engines for other purposes.
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