Visualize Yahoo! Web Search Results
A service called Grokker groups Yahoo! Web Search results into a categorized, animated display.
When you type a query at Yahoo! Web Search (http://search.yahoo.com), Yahoo! will return a list of sites in an order that Yahoo! thinks is best. This is a great way to view results when you’re looking for a specific bit of information, but it’s not as helpful if you want to quickly get a broad overview of a general topic. A free web service called Grokker (http://www.grokker.com) takes the top 158 Yahoo! Web Search results for a query, categorizes the documents in the results, and displays them as groups in a visual map.
Imagine you’re looking for information about DNA; type in the term DNA and you’ll get the familiar sequential list of sites, as shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1. Yahoo! Search results for DNA
You’ll find some sites with information about DNA, but it’s difficult to find patterns within the results. You could mentally categorize sites as you browse through the pages of results, but Grokker can do the categorization for you, quickly giving you a sense of the type of information related to the query DNA. Perform the same query at Grokker, and you’ll see the radically different display of results shown in Figure 5-2.
It takes a few minutes to orient yourself to a Grokker map, but once you know how to read the results, you can scan a large amount ...
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