Grokker - broad searches

by Sapphire (June 17, 2005)

There’s a new demo of Grokker out from Groxis. Grokker is a broad search engine: you plug in a keyword or keyphrase, and it gives you some very general results - in the form of a bunch of circles you can click. You click circles within circles until you narrow it down to the results you want.

Check out a search term like “dinette sets” and you get very different results than on Yahoo or Google. The linear search engines give you what they feel is the most relevant site on the web in the No. 1 position. Grokker gives you a ton of crap to sort through, including “bedroom furniture”. On the other hand, it offers a circle for “high quality” and another one for “solid wood”, so if those happen to describe a dinette set you’re looking for, it might lead you in exactly the right direction.

This engine is definitely for the type of searching academics and fans do - where they want to see all the sites that have info on a particular subject. While it is supposed to slowly narrow in to exactly the result YOU want, not the result Google or Yahoo chose for you, for me it’s working better on the sort of search where I hope to create 12 bookmarks of stuff to check out.

But I spent 8 years learning how to think like a freakin’ search engine bot, which I think did me some brain damage. So I think I need to give Grokker more of a shot before making a final decision.

Posted in SEO
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