18 July 2008

23 + 5 Task #3

Today I had a look at KartOO, a search engine with a difference. This is quite fun at first, just in the way that my search results are presented to me - everything is shown in a visual layout like a map, with links to how different search destinations are connected. A search on my favourite actor, Gary Oldman, brings up a very colourful first page of connected maps to info about every possible public aspect of his life, career, education, relationships and lifestyle choices. This is only the first of about 4 million maps of info about Gary or stuff related him. Pheww!

I also did a search on my own name, as one does, and was once again horrified at the number of already-pictured-on-the-web singer/songwriters with my birth name. Really scary. Lucky I have a swathe of pseudonyms just crying out to be employed...

The disadvantage of KartOO seems to be that I can't do an advanced search, or, in fact, any other than a general search, as far as I can see, so the options are a bit limited - although, I guess the types of web pages shown on the KartOO map, (blogs, news, photo, posters, selected movie titles, etc) would help me hone down my search to some degree. Not necessarily in the specific direction I might be looking for though.

Overall, KartOO is a bit of fun and is a good example of an alternative presentation style for a search engine.

Personally, my favourite is Brendan Dawes' McGoogle (after clicking on this link, scroll down to try) it's a classic.

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