SF Signal: I hardly know her!

I hardly know her!

We all know that searching the web can be more challenging than trying to hit the 50 hole while playing "Dyson Sphere skee ball", especially if you're looking for a topic that returns millions of results like ipod, or Iraq, or recombinant lexography. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could see the results of your search visually? And what if the results were themselves organized by general topic - allowing you to further refine that ipod search into things like product reviews or merchants selling accessories?

Well, if that sounds intriguing to you, check out Grokker. This uniqe little Java application shows you the search results from Google in a way that just has to be seen to be appreciated. It organizes the search results visually so you can pick through just the things you really wanted to see. It's free for 30 days, after that there is a $50 license fee. While it is cool, I'm not sure its quite $50 cool. It might be a harbinger of the future in the wild world of high-stakes search engines, though, and so it's worth a look.

Scott,

you do know that google bombing only works when many sites link a term to a particular other site, right? not the same site linking to it many times... And lotsa times, people who common search terms, I doubt anyone would know what "recombinant lexography" let alone search for it. What does it mean anyway?

Posted by Pete on Sunday April 25, 2004 at 11:52 AM

Oh and Pete, what I did worked. Google up recombinant lexography and see who has the #1 entry.

The point of 'google bombing' is to take over a commonly used search term (like scientology) and point it at something you want it to go to (like sites about how much scientology sucks.)

This wasn't a google bomb because nobody would search for that term. What I was doing was proving that I could control google with the blog.

Posted by Scott on Sunday April 25, 2004 at 2:55 PM