All the big names (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves etc) are trying to find ways to drive users to, and keep users at their search portals. Most of the stuff they are adding, while interesting and sometimes cool, isn’t really all that useful.
Then along comes a relative unknown who finds an easy way to do something that really does help you search and isn’t just eye candy. One of these new companies is Kartoo. The KartOO visual meta search engine gives a visual representation of search results which allow you to see how the different returned results related to each other and an easy method of narrowing the returned topics down till you find what you are looking for. This allows you to decide quickly and accurately which of the returned results best suit your needs and is more innovative then all the search engine interfaces I’ve seen thus far. But it isn’t without faults. The page uses Flash, which while it is pretty, it’s also slow for low speed connections, the pictorial results display could be more intuitive and due to the design of the site, you can’t link to specific searches on other sites. Still, this is the sort of innovation all the search engines should be concentrating on, (along with the actual search algorithms) because the display of search results is more or less uniform across the big three and in all cases usually requires multiple attempts to find the information you’re looking for. I still don’t understand the significance of the Genie at Kartoo though.
