Kartoo.com has made an ingenious innovation in the concept of a search engine.
Anyone who is visually oriented will find that Kartoo transforms a usual search into
an almost three-dimensional, imaging experience.The search engine relies
on the user’s Macromedia Flash plug-in. In contrast to the typical
search engines, Kartoo converts hits into a two-dimensional map. Web
sites become hotspot icons animated by a mouse-over, and prominent
topic words that have been found to be relevant to the search are
interspersed between the web site icons.
Mousing over a topic word generates spokes, or arches, connecting the
topic word to any websites containing it. Conversely, mousing over a
web site creates spokes that point to any relevant keywords. Mousing
over a web site displays the summary of the web site and a snap shot of
its homepage in the frame to the left of the map, and also generates an
options menu in the lower right corner of the map, and, besides having
the standard search engine options, offers a searcher to see related
sites, see the site homepage, see related sites, or start keeping track
of the site.Mousing over a keyword toggles the lower right
window to a menu prompting a user to add the word to a personal search,
to remove it from the search, to modify the search, or to see search
statistics of the word.
The topic words reappear in the left frame, which shows additional
options for seeing the search in the popular searches. Mousing over a
topic word in the left frame also shows the word and its corresponding
web connections.The map also includes zoom-in and zoom-out controls.For
those surfers who love the visual aspect of Internet, or are easily
bored by the standard search engines, Kartoo is definitely an eye candy.