Visual search seems to have come and gone. In 2004, Groxis released the colorful Grokker search client and received $12 mil in funding. Apparently, the consumer market didn’t more than nibble at the innovation; Groxis has pulled the product and refocused on the enterprise knowledge management market.

KartOO is a French company with a skillset somewhat similar to Groxis’. They sell turnkey search engines for the internet and intranet, information visualization, intelligence monitoring, and geomapping software to the enterprise. They don’t seem to have – or at least don’t anymore – consumer ambitions. However, they do have a fully functioning public showpiece of their search visualization technology.

(Here's the first level search results for "Aeon Flux" with the theme "animation" hovered over:)

It could very well be that Grokker and KartOO are too ahead of the mass market and that with time the list of textual results we accept today will seem anachronistic. So even if not popular, the search presentation innovations of today are worth examining as sketches for the future. Google is already changing the results page by partitioning the results into functional categories such as images, news, blogs, etc.

KartOO is a meta-search engine that like Grokker, groups the results into themes or concepts. Grokker represents results and their sets as concentric and zoomable colored circles. KartOO – a rich flash application - draws concept maps: a set of concepts are overlayed onto the same map as the search results (a dozen or so results per map). Hovering over a concept activates colored lines connecting all relevant results – weblinks - to the concept. Hovering over a result activates colored lines connecting the result to all relevant concepts. This idea is basically isomorphic to tags and tagclouds but done on a map. But here, the tags are machine generated.

Clicking on a result obviously opens the webpage; less obviously, clicking on a concept “explodes” that subset of results, ie KartOO seems to recursively apply the same main level algorithm to the sublevel.

KartOO’s results may look cartoony compared to Grokker’s fractal-like spectacle, but KartOO is a lot more concise because each result is depicted only once on a map and more information dense and space efficient whereas Grokker seems to revel in redundancy by finding excuses to make circles out of different concepts which often contain the same weblinks; also zooming in Grokker is purely an optical effect whereas clicking on “themes” in KartOO really does expand the results; and you can keep drilling indefinitely into the results.