Search Visualizer

Today’s search engines display information that’s dense, ugly and almost useless for real understanding. You see a list of ten article titles, with a snippet of text from each, and your brain freezes. It’s fatiguing to read, scan, guess. The major search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo — employ a very basic user interface, for all the sophisticated underlying technology. You see those ten results, select one that looks promising, click and cross your fingers.

Even a fast skim reader takes time to read the top ten, hover, dither and click. And we rarely go on to the next ten results. The ranking algorithm that the search engine uses to present the top ten could have the really valuable information you’re looking for, but you won’t know for sure till you go to the website. So you often end up clicking on something that has limited connection with your interest, visiting a site, clicking back, and scanning some more. This especially applies to complex searches, where two or more keywords are used.

Search Visualizer speeds up this process by orders of magnitude, by stripping out the clutter — all those words. It shows you a graphic representation of the document, with your search terms highlighted in color. Very simple and fast. Using it for the first time, you already know how it works; for all its power, it takes no training. You spot the most promising results immediately by seeing the colored clusters of your keywords. You eliminate the useless results immediately. This takes place in a few seconds, without reading the document.

Even a child can identify useful connections in a few seconds.

And then — when you hover over a cluster of colored links, Search Visualizer has pre-fetched the underlying text for you, and you see an x-ray popup of the document at that point. Click, and you dive directly into the document.

Search Visualizer was developed by Gordon Rugg and the knowledge modelling team at Keele University in the UK. Well-known for having solved one of the most difficult intellectual challenges in history, the Voynich Manuscript — recounted by Wired –

After cracking Voynich, Gordon and his team tackled the search engine challenge.

Very large documents can be miniaturized to the point where they fit onto a single screen. There are several levels of miniaturization: at the level of individual words, of sentences and of paragraphs. This means that you can see a several documents, each several hundred pages long, all compressed onto a single screen on your computer.

Search Visualizer displays visual results from any search engine, using any browser; it is fully enabled for Bing right now. All the regular features of Bing work, including showing the standard text results. The right part of the screen is used by Search Visualizer. As fast as Bing delivers the text results, Search Visualizer images pop up next to them. All standards-compliant, using XML, PHP and a fast standard graphics library; no Java, Flash, add-ons or plug-ins. Fully enabled for mobile devices.

I’ve been using SV for several months now, and get more impressed each time I use it. The pre-beta software is running online now, and we’re working to add features, documentation, examples preparing for a full beta release. Showing to select potential customers, upon request.
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…Michael North