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.

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.