Kartoo: Visualizing the Internet

Search engines have come a long way from the days of Archie (Wikipedia) and Gopher (Wikipedia). WebCrawler (Wikipedia) was the first widely used search engine by 1994. Then Yahoo (Wikipedia) tried to create a giant table of contents for the Internet before diversifying into other web services such as auctions. I preferred to use Excite (Wikipedia) before it crashed and burned after the scandalous @Home (Wikipedia) merger. Then in 2001, a small Linux-based search engine called Google appeared with a focus on web searching and doing that well. For a long time, a Google search almost always found what you were looking for. As the Internet grew, the limits of plain term-based searches were clearly putting a strain on the effectiveness of Google's aging PageRank (Wikipedia) system.

I've done a lot of work over the last few months to make this Lone Coder column more visible on the Internet, including creating an index page, making better use of meta tags, providing an RSS feed, and so forth. I recently checked the results of my work with a search on Google and got the following page:

Screenshot: Google search of "Lone Coder Ken Burtch".

For all my work at improving access, a Google search returned the home page, my Business Shell page, but none of the dozens of articles, not even the most recent one, appeared.

Google's search engine does what it's supposed to do. It performs a basic keyword search and displays the results in a simple list. Unfortunately, even searching for "Lone Coder Ken Burtch" results in many uninteresting hits. Why wasn't my web site more prominent using such a specific search? Or, in a broader way, why don't my Google searches for other topics get good hits?

Enter Kartoo, a meta-search engine that picks up where Google leaves off by categorizing pages visually. Like Google, Kartoo finds the closest matches to your search terms. Then, using Flash, Kartoo displays the results in a 2-D topographical display, showing how search terms relate to the different pages.

Screenshot: Kartoo search of "Lone Coder Ken Burtch".

You can see here in the web column area of the map, the www.pegasoft.ca URL appears with multiple pages, a good indication of where the Lone Coder column can be found. Toronto's Linux Caffe, which carries the Lone Coder column on its web site, appears near the Linux section.

Home pages are marked with a drawing of a house. Moving a mouse over an item causes Kartoo to display a synopsis of the web site on the left side of the screen. You can drill down into the map by clicking on items or by selecting more search terms along the left side of the screen.

What does the Canadian Linux scene look like from the point-of-view of a search engine? Let's take a look.

Screenshot: Kartoo search of "Linux Canada".

How disappointing. PegaSoft and the Lone Coder column don't even make a showing. But KarToo makes it clear why: Linux businesses, consultants, service organizations, magazines all make an appearance. There is a broad spectrum of different aspects to Linux, with the top web sites in each area. There's just not enough activity for the Lone Coder to dominate, say, the Linux Journal. In the same way, the Ottawa-Carleton LUG dominates the other user groups. But Kartoo makes it clear why and makes it easy to narrow the search to find what you're looking for.

Still, Kartoo has some limitations. The documentation is not up-to-date and not all symbols on the map are explained. Some my prefer to avoid the graphics and go for the more list-oriented approach offered by Vivisimo's Clusty.

Kartoo is a great tool for seeing how your web site fits into the view of the Internet. It also makes it possible to creatively explore unexpected relationships, and to visually narrow down those million hit search results.

July 16, 2007