Talk of search engines! One would be so lost without them. All those billions of pages of information that Internet can boast of will be so meaningless, if one is unaware of the different sites. May Buddha bless me!

Internet technology has really reached puberty. Suddenly HTML looks so antediluvian. There are Java and related technologies (believe me fella’s Java is revamped on GUI side…the Netscape 6 interface is very attractive, its build on Java), then XML etc are the latest buzz. Flash, Shockwave from Macromedia enable such wonderful sites and are a rage. Check http://spiderman.sonypictures.com, which is made in Flash.

Oh! Digressing, am I? Ok, but the one question I want to answer is ’’Are there any breathtaking new technologies for Search Engines?’’

Google with its PageRank is the most popular and WISEnut with its WISErank is a strong runner up. (If you want to know how they work, I already have technical reviews on both of them, do read ’em). All others fail too impress me. Ah, wait the search engine of www.forindia.com with its ’’sentence’’ search is good too. But it’s a meta search engine i.e. it passes the query to many crawlers like Google, HotBot, NorthernLight, Altavista….at least 10 such engines and then presents the topmost results of each. Good idea! But then most engines come with same results, what a waste! Again Google, Wisenut etc are unattractive with its plain Jane looks.

Does anybody need change, without sacrificing performance? Switch over to karTOO.(www.kartoo.com)

karTOO is a different type of meta search engine that launched in April 2002. It has a neat interface with a Genie bobbing up and down and textbox with search buttons and other buttons like ’’view’’, ’’options’’, ’’help’’, ’’kartoo’’ at the top of screen. It queries other search engines including, you guessed it, Google, besides many others. So what’s different?
1) The way it passes query to search engines
2) The way it displays the results

1) The way it passes query to search engines:Suppose you want to search Aishwarya Rai. To avoid Aishwarya Khan or Salman Rai, you would rather put double quotes around the words like ’’Aishwarya Rai’’. But not many search engines understand double quotes. How many search engines understand Boolean words like Aishwarya AND Rai or Aishwarya ADJ Rai or Aishwarya + Rai - Salman? KarTOO understands this and based on user’s syntax, questions those search engines first, which understands the syntax used. Neat, hey!

2) The way it displays the results: Taa Daa! This is the best part, and it’s unique! It displays the results graphically! It presents a map of results - really? KarTOO uses Flash interface and XML communicating capabilities of Flash for caching of data. (ab TIC bolega achougoo phir shuru hua). Ok I will explain with example.

Coming back to Aishwarya Rai, (excuse me but I agree that I am obsessed). There are many sites. So there will be a big sized 3D spherical button for www.aishwaryarai.com if it’s a famous site with many popular sites having the links to it (remember Page Rank). Then there will be a slightly smaller button for www.bollywood.com, which has, photos, wallpapers etc of Ash. Another button for www.tripod.com/achougoo/ash.htm where a die-hard fan has posted some real good snaps of Ash (hey don’t bother to check…its just an example). Another small button far off is www.aajtak.com, which may have news of Ash about her Cannes film festival experience.

These spheres are joined by dynamic runtime generated semantic links. Here’s the example. www.aishwaryarai.com and www.aajtak.com will be linked to keyword ’’news’’. www.aishwaryarai.com and www.tripod.com/achougoo/ash.htm will be linked to keyword ’’photos’’ www.aishwaryarai.com and www.bollywood.com will be linked to keywords ’’wallpapers’’, ’’movies’’, ’’photos’’, ’’news’’, ’’screensavers’’, ’’devdas’’. These links look like a coloured freehand drawn line. So you see it’s this display or maps, which makes karTOO stand apart and then there’s more.

* If you move mouse over the spherical button, the summary or description appears on top-left side of page. Also the keywords linked to the site are encircled. It’s a visual treat.

* If you move mouse over the link a plus, minus menu comes. So suppose you want more sites on wallpaper, go to keyword ’’wallpaper’’ and click on ’’+’’. If you don’t want news, goto ’’news’’ and click ’’-’’. The map refreshes accordingly.

* There are more maps (analogous to more pages). You can also send a map by email or save it for future reference. The map can be panned or zoomed into or out of (activate this through View-->Zoom menu). User can choose the no. of sites to be displayed in a single map. Higher number may make map appear cluttered, but more information is quickly obtained.

* There is advanced search that allows you to search by words in ’’title’’, ’’URL’’, ’’site’’, ’’domain’’, ’’web page’’, ’’meta tag or header’’, ’’expressions’’ and also images. Amazing, isn’t it?

* The map looks can be customized. The background page colour can be blue, green, grey, white…your choice. The nodes can be spherical buttons with different color options or like circular shirt buttons etc. The links can be thin or 3D like PVC wires or like elongated balloons. Talk of customization!

* For users who are uncomfortable to changes and want old plain Jane looks, an HTML version of Kartoo is also available. ’’Tu bhi khush, main bhi khush’’ approach.

Advantage over Google:
The cartographic interface, of course. But here’s what I discovered. I searched for words ’’XML’’ in Google and the first few were links such as www.w3.org, followed by www.w3.org/markup/, then validator.w3.org followed by validator.w3.org/check/referrer, besides other websites like xml.com, xml.org etc. So the point is pages from the same website appear in the list. Same search in karTOO gave me two big buttons www.w3.org and validator.w3.org besides xml.com, xml.org etc.

Thus, there are no repetitions or rather I would say that the grouping of web sites is very well done. Also we get to see the links, which cannot be seen in any other search engine results. The same funda of grouping also differentiates karTOO from other meta searches as same results from different engines are clubbed as one. Thus, we get more information on a single page (rather MAP).

Any flaws?One which is trifle and one that needs serious thinking.

The flash graphics, collecting results from different search engines and grouping them in categories, making maps etc. make the website a bit slow. But only a lil bit slow.

The more serious issue is use of ActiveX. Firstly if your IE settings are on ’’highest safety’’ i.e. ’’allow Active X components to load/run’’ is disabled, then karTOO doesn’t run well. Also if you allow it, there’s a threat of viruses making your PC insecure. With ZoneAlarm or personal firewalls on, there’s a lot of disturbance where user’s brain is taxed - should I click ’’yes’’ and permit karTOO or ’’no’’ is safer.

Flaw or no flaw, I urge all readers to break the mould and try this new variant, It’s impressive!