grokker.com

Grokker is a new and radical way to search the web and share information. Search engines are great for finding specific pieces of data, but as the amount of information online grows, search engines just aren't good enough to help us explore topics that we're interested in.

If the sites hosting the information in required context are not heavily linked to, they get lost in the ranking phase. Take for example a search term "tiger" It would be nice to know all the contexts in which tiger is part of: Animal Kingdom, Apple OS, Golf(tigerwoods) etc. in one screen and then we can dig in into the context that tickles us.

Earlier, i posted about clusty.com here. The visual interface to search results offered by grokker to such clustered results is ofcourse cool and adds a visual dimension to information retrieval. But, Visual search to me seems to be more of a fancy thing. What might be the opinion of Usability experpts on this flashy feature?

A few points to observe in clusty vs grokker paradigm:

• Grokker, in addition to this visual innovation uses of search results from Yahoo!, which uses better crawling, search and ranking algorithms than those of clusty.
• The clustering algorithms used by the products seem to be impressive and comparable in performance.
• The result set of clusty.com is not very exhaustive (poor recall score)
  

Interesting is the plugin architecture developed by groxis (it seems they patented it) All u have to do is change the source of result set. For Grokker, they come from Yahoo!. It could very well be your corporate database and tools of groxis would neatly cluster"ify" and gui"fy" i.e organise your data into clusters of related information and present eye candy visual search results.