[Air-l] Interesting new search engine

[Steve Jones]

>
>Kartoo
>
>On April 25, Kartoo SA launched a new generation meta-search engine 
>called Kartoo. It provides an innovative, visual way to retrieve 
>information from the web. The Kartoo technology has been under 
>development for two years and http://www.kartoo.com/ is it's first 
>'proof of concept' application.
>
>Laurent Baleydier, the designer of Kartoo, set himself the goal of 
>developing a powerful meta-search engine that would help internet 
>users precisely tune their information searching through a very 
>intuitive interface, with no need for them to master the Boolean 
>processing units. Kartoo resides online, requiring no prior software 
>downloading. It provides a multilingual interface (English, French, 
>and soon Spanish and Portuguese). Web sites are classified according 
>to a proprietary algorithm that emphasizes the most relevant sites 
>and the software automatically selects the most pertinent search 
>engines.
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>
>Web sites identified by a search are placed on a map; the sites are 
>represented by balls, with their size in proportion to how relevant 
>they are. The balls are connected together by dynamic semantic links 
>(e.g. the semantic link between daewoo.com and renault.fr is "car 
>manufacturer"). Clicking on the link allows to add or subtract the 
>theme to your initial request, and Kartoo translates the syntax 
>depending on which search engines are activated.
>
>Advanced search functions (URL, near, domain, images) are also 
>available. Kartoo allows you to choose the graphic environment in 
>which selected sites appear. The visual graphic results display can 
>also be modified: background colour, representation of semantic 
>links, and moving from a cartographic mode to a "standard" mode with 
>a list of brief descriptions. Maps can be stored locally and 
>forwarded.
>Few software products are marketed solely as a public search engine, 
>and Kartoo is no exception. They offer several products for 
>commercial market: intranet, portal, thematic (software research, 
>finance, medical), and digital TV. Its major application to CI 
>searching is its capability to identify and elegantly display 
>complex relationships between topics and company sites.
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