Tonight we are very fortunate to have two of the leaders in the area of visualization; Randy Smith with KoolTorch, (Search Engine of the Month, March) and Anselm Spoerri of searchCrystal. Here are samples of their results pages:



searchCrystal

KoolTorch

As you can see, they are radically different than the usual list of ten text results! They have a lot to share about visualization in general, and their respective approaches to it in particular. And as always, please feel free to leave your comments at the end of the debate.

1. What is the core target audience of your website? Why do you think your target audience will use your interface over the traditional or text based formats?

KoolTorch: The target audience for KoolTorch is the general public of Internet users, who will use KoolTorch because it makes search review easier and quicker. KoolTorch is ideal for e-commerce searches, such as the ebay search (below), and broad ranging informational data searching. We are presently building an application demo for a government database search, where there is a lot of information in many different areas.

searchCrystal: Some of our target audiences are:

* People who want to see and compare the top 10 results from the best engines in a single display. (People can also embed a searchCrystal widget on their page.
* People who want to know what the web, blogs etc. are saying about them.
* People who need more than a few answers to their search questions,

such as “who are my potential competitors, partners or customers?”
* Students who want to have a sense of the quality of the returned search
results (since the more engines that recommend a page, the more likely this
page is relevant and the greater the agreement between the search engines,
the higher the quality).
* Power Searchers who want to explore and filter 50-500 web pages, blogs,

news etc. in a single display that lets them compare different queries or result sets across time.
* Search Marketers who need to see how their site is ranked in the search results of the major search engines for a set of different keywords.
* Bloggers who want to embed a crystal on their blog to show several images,
videos etc that related a topic they are discussing.
* Flickr users who want to showcase their photos based on shared tags.

2. What is the goal of your visualization interface and what existing problems do you see it solving? How does your interface achieve that goal?

KoolTorch: The goal of KoolTorch is simple - to make search review FASTER and EASIER than ever before. One problem of other interfaces is the inefficient use of screen space. KoolTorch optimizes the limited and valuable real estate of the screen, showing a large number of search results simply and meaningfully organized on and immediately accessible from a single screen. And the drill down feature allows more intuitive and easy navigation of search results.

For example, after perusing an initial graphics page with 100 results and drilling down to a desired results set, the user can convert that page to text to see descriptions/images for all the displayed results, drill down further or convert back to graphics. As to the other visualization ASE’s, all of which are very impressive and which we greatly respect, we believe they are directed to a more sophisticated audience and for a different type of searching because they are more complex than KoolTorch. We do not believe they make search review as simple and quick as KoolTorch, our goal. Read the rest of this entry »

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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