Kartoo
http://www.kartoo.com
I am often asked how I find new sites for these Poynter tips and my surfing classes. After all, keeping up with the growing Web isn’t easy. It helps that I spend hours online scouting the Web. But I get most of my ideas from the friends, colleagues, PR folks, and complete strangers who fill my inbox.
So when fellow new media educator Paula Park — a senior editor at The Scientist — sent me an e-mail with “a very cool search engine” in the subject line, I had to check it out at once. She had never steered me wrong. And she hadn’t this time either.
The search engine is France-based Kartoo.com. I had never heard of it and when I first went to the site, I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. But after spending a few minutes there, I decided it’s worth sharing with you.
The folks at Google have nothing to fear from Kartoo, which piggybacks on Google and other engines, but presents its results unconventionally: as “maps.” The results are displayed in a way that allows you to tell which sites are more important and how they are connected, using spheres of various sizes to represent sites. You can then jump to the site you are interested in by clicking on the sphere. Once you get the hang of it, it’s fun and useful.
Some caveats: It’s not very intuitive (you need type your query in the semi-hidden white bar on the front page) and “the genie in the lamp” icon/mascot is rather tacky. The visual mapping stuff that makes this cool to begin with only works in the Flash version. If your computer doesn’t have Flash, it reverts to simple text results and is a waste of your time.
I am still a big Google believer, and use it to start every search I conduct. But as Jon Dube outlined in his tip last Friday about AllTheWeb.com, it’s good to try the features of some of the other search engines.
