Webware

Put this feature in the category of neat looking but potentially headache inducing. It's a recently-introduced YouTube feature that lets users view videos in a floating array of thumbnails. Users of Digg's swarm visualization will feel right at home, as both share a slightly similar interface (albeit Digg's is a little more useful).

To access the warp mode click on the full screen button in any YouTube video (the one on the far right) and then move all the way over to the left to the strange triangle-looking button. Clicking it zooms the video out into a black space with tiny round video thumbnails. Holding your mouse over any of them will pull up other similar videos--a process you can continue forever, or until you hit a dead end (marked with a red border). If you've ever used Quintura's video search, it works the same way.

One thing to note is that this feature only works from videos watched on YouTube, and not embedded clips. It also doesn't seem to work yet with videos that have YouTube's overlay ads in them.

Update: Gallery of warp videos here.

The Webware 100 is going strong, and if you're still in the voting mood, Digg has unveiled their list of 10 finalists for their API visualization contest, which can be voted on by--you guessed it--digging. Like Digg Expose, which I wrote about earlier this week (and is coincidentally a nominee), each of the finalists has found some really neat ways to play with Digg user data.

One of the most interesting aspects of this contest is the use of Adobe Apollo. Four of the 10 finalists' offerings are served up as Apollo apps, which is fairly impressive considering how young the platform is. The only downer is having to download and install them as applications.

Currently, one of the most popular visualizations is DiggCity, which represents the 10 most recently popular stories as buildings in a small, virtual city. Users who Digg stories are displayed as stick figures, who go into each building and make it bigger. It immediately reminded me of Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600 with its simplistic graphics style, and meandering residents (see picture to the right), but succeeds in quickly showing you which stories are getting the most growth.

Another neat nominee is WordWeb, which joins together the most prevalent keywords used on the service to show relationships. Stories with similar keywords get grouped and linked up, and you can simply click on keywords to explore what other stories are connected. Exploring WordWeb feels a little bit like Quintura, the visual search engine, although the only results you're getting will be Digg stories.

My personal favorite of all of the entries is DiggCharts, which is a really simple tool to track popular stories, and when they got there. Typically this information is relegated to the content owners who have access to traffic stats; in this case, you're getting the data from when the story made its way onto Digg. Digg Charts breaks down the popularity of the 10 stories that most recently made their way onto the front page. You can then drill down through each story and view when the story began to pick up its Diggs, user comments, and popularity. In many cases, the curves all have a similar flow, although I came across one or two that had gone up and down a few times before beginning to peak.

All of the nominees can be found here. There's also a post about it on the official Digg blog.

Standard search engines are great for finding individual Web pages to answer discrete questions. But their lists of search results do not help you to understand a field in general. If that's what you need, you might want to check a visual search engine that clusters results, and in doing so gives you a better overview of a field.

Quintura is the most recently updated and most useful of the tools. It creates a tag cloud based on your search term, and when you hover your mouse over a term, it dives into the term and gives you a more detailed tag cloud around that. A standard list of Web search results show up in the site's right-hand pane, and it refreshes automatically when you hover over links in the tag cloud. Only when you want to actually visit a Web page do you click on a link.

Quintura is easy to use, easy to understand, and does a good job of showing you the shape of a field of knowledge. There's even a kids' version. As with other search visualizers, it's very good at helping you to narrow down search results if your initial query is ambiguous. For example, if you search for "Dvorak," and you're looking for information on the composer rather than the alternate keyboard layout, you can quickly drill into your results; you'll simultaneously see a useful cloud of keywords and can filter out what you don't want.

Clusty also clumps results, but it does so in a more traditional format: an expandable, outline-like list of subtopics to the left of your results. It's less weird, and less fun, but just as useful as Quintura. It's probably better suited to people with very organized minds. Outliner fans will like it.

Clusty also has a Wii-friendly version, which is a neat trick.

Kartoo reflects a search concept that was in vogue a few years ago: Cartographic search. This site puts its results on a background that looks a bit like a topographical map of the ocean's floor. It's supposed to show you how "islands" in your results separate from your mainland of hits. Kartoo also has other clever features. When you hover over a site on its map, it draws lines between the site and other related sites. In the left-hand pane, it shows you either a changing topic list (Clusty-like) in the left-hand pane, or a visual site preview, depending on what your mouse is hovering over. Despite the richness of the data it returns, I find the interface confusing. There's too much happening on Kartoo, and it doesn't lend itself to quick comprehension of a field.

Kartoo (L): Too much going on. Ujiko (R): Beam me up!

Kartoo has other interesting search visualization projects, including Ujiko, which to me looks like a search engine that the Star Trek set designers would build. It shows results in a bizarre oval menu with an open center section where the user can flag particular results as relevant. This input helps narrow down results. The center section also shows how terms in multiple results relate to each other, using a wheel of color codes attached to individual results. I think you need Spock's brain to interpret the data. That said, it's entertaining to use and does return useful and very specific results.

Grokker displays search results as bubbles inside bigger bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the more results (Web page hits or sub-bubbles) inside it. It is very easy to zoom in and out of subcategories to get a good understanding of a result set. The interface is fluid and Grokker is fun to use. A control panel, which is unique to this engine, lets you refine date ranges and data sources. The company's main business is providing search technologies to big companies, but Grokker is a good consumer search visualizer nonetheless.

I haven't integrated any of these tools into my daily routine, but at first blush Quintura looks to be the most useful, since it gives both easily-understood overviews of a field as well as specific Web page results, without overloading on a bunch of new search concepts and interface tricks.

The value of a search engine often depends on who is using it and why. As vague as that might seem, it's important for developers to consider their audience when designing search interfaces. Search company Quintura has carved out a niche with a new search tool called Quintura for Kids. In a nutshell, it's an Internet search engine designed to be both friendly and functional for kids.

Typing in a search query brings up a list of results on the bottom of the page and a cloud of similar search terms up top. Mousing over any of these terms will drill down further, filling both the top and bottom halves of the screen with updated search results. For example, typing in monkey will bring up related words such as spider, howler, ball, and so forth. Mousing over one of those words will give you a few more suggestions in the nebula, with narrowed results on the lower half of the screen.

Quintura differs from Google Search in that it's not all about page rank. Quintura's parent search site--no pun intended--drives this cloud-result search technology called See & Find, and it's a great way to brainstorm for search terms. If you want to get even more precise, there's a red X by each term in the cloud; instead of typing out complicated exclusion rules you can simply click the small X marks to get rid of terms you want to avoid. At the same time, clicking on these Xs adds the correct exclusion rules to your search query, teaching users advanced search techniques without complicated instructions.

In essence, the children's version of Quintura isn't much different from the regular version. What sets it apart is the seasonal background--which, incidentally, clutters the interface--and five scattered preset searches for science, games, TV, music, and animals. Clicking any of those five icons will launch a simple search query.

As far as using Quintura for Kids over Google or Windows Live Search for the speediest results, I can't recommend it. However, with some practice you can efficiently find what you're looking for using Quintura's cloud-result search technology. Children might enjoy the presets that Quintura has gathered for their kids' section, but I'd feel safer allowing children access to the entire Internet with Google's SafeSearch technology. Using Quintura for Kids, searching for popular junk e-mail hooks such as Viagra and XXX results in censored searching. Instead of sticking in an artificial dead end, I'd rather see an intelligent search engine redirect kids to a page about malware, spam, and other Web security issues.