An Information Revolution?...Newsletter

An Information Revolution?

As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they not only give you what you ask for..they often give you what you don’t ask for. The result is too much information, and a lot of it isn't even close, or worse, the good stuff is buried on the xxth page of results...and who really bothers to read the dozens (or thousands) of pages of results that Google generates on many searches?

Some intriguing technologies are getting better at bringing order to all the search chaos, and could revolutionize how people mine the Internet for information. Software now emerging analyzes search results and automatically sorts them into categories that, at a glance, present far more information than the typical textual list.

A new development of this principle is Grokker, a downloadable program that not only sorts search results into categories but also "maps" the results in a holistic way, showing each category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear as more circles that can be clicked on and investigated in detail.

It takes a few minutes to get used to the Grokker interface. But the value of its nonlinear and more intuitive approach quickly becomes clear. Grokker appears to offer a time and labor saving by making searches more productive the first time and by making the searcher better at formatting the search question. “Grokking” as the Grokker people call it is an interesting and potentially valuable alternative to searches on the web.

For more information or a free trial subscription, try it out free for the next 30 days at: http://www.groxis.com/service/grok/ Let us know what you think about this approach...send a note to bschroer@socialmarketing.org And..if you’ve got a new product or piece of software you would like to share...send a note and a link so we can take a look at it.....

Disclosure: The Social Librarian does not accept paid sponsorships and we have no commercial relationship with Grokker