Posted on Thu, October 3, 2002
Add horizontal searches to get refined results
By Joyce Kasman Valenza
Inquirer Columnist
If you and your students rely on one traditional search engine exclusively, you may be missing an important search refinement strategy.
Autocategorization, or topic clustering, presents those frustrating millions of search results in an organized manner.
Laura Cohen, one of my search heroes, who offers her Web lessons to the world through her pages at the University of Albany, describes this feature as "horizontal searching."
Consider traditional search tools, which create long lists of results for browsing, one page after the next, as "vertical" search tools. "Horizontal" tools analyze a search, and automatically sort results into categories and, in some cases, subcategories. The feature allows students to instantly select results for Saturn, the planet, from a result list that might contain thousands of results relating to Saturn, the car. Similarly, it identifies and groups clusters of links relating to Saturn's rings, its satellites, and related astronomical events. When this feature works well, it helps students to refine their information need, by distinguishing subtopics and the nuances of a subject's vocabulary, and by allowing them to quickly identify and remove the irrelevant.
The net effect of a horizontal search is that relevant information that might have been virtually invisible, buried on page 300 of a vertical result list, can rise to the top, accessible through categories listed on page one.
Cohen recommends learning about and using one or two of these new horizontal tools as companions to a vertical search. You might decide to begin your research at VivĚsimo to see the span of topics and subtopics available, and then return to an old favorite such as Google once you know what you are looking for.
Which search engines search horizontally? VivĚsimo, at http://www.vivisimo.com/, spontaneously organizes results from a variety of search tools into hierarchies of topics and subtopics in a file-folder-tree display.
Turbo10, at http://www.turbo10.com, is a meta-search engine with the impressive ability to search the deep Web, that is, the Web not easily accessible by search engines because it is buried in databases and non-HTML files. A pull-down menu lists its clusters and the number of sites each cluster offers.
Guidebeam, at http://www.guidebeam.com, is a utility that has developed a kind of symbiotic relationship with a variety of search tools. Now posted over Yahoo, Guidebeam extracts and infers phrases from documents, and automatically clusters them into a browsable "hyperindex."
WiseNut, at http://www.wisenut.com, besides its WiseGuide categories, claims to improve on Google's link relevance system with more frequent Web crawling and context-sensitive ranking.
Teoma, at http://www.teoma.com, now owned by Ask Jeeves, organizes results in three sections: Results are ranked by subject-specific popularity; Refine suggests topic clusters to narrow the search; and Resources offers link collections created by experts and enthusiasts.
iBoogie, at http://www.iboogie.com, resembles VivĚsimo in its folder-tree approach, but its deep Web holdings tend to be commercial.
Query Server, at www.queryserver.com , a meta-search tool, queries the general Web, or health, money or government sites, and offers handy customizing features along with its Result Clusters.
Ixquick, at http://www.ixquick.com, a meta-search tool with a kind of "greatest hits" approach to results, offers "Related Searches" suggestions, and a star ranking system summarizing the consensus of the major search engines.
New features to watch:
Kartoo, at http://www.kartoo.com, a meta-search tool, available in either Flash or HTML versions, presents its "topical families" of results on a highly attractive "cartographic interface."
WebBrain, at www.webbrain.com , uses concept mapping to make the subject categories of the Open Directory project more visual and accessible.
Alexa, at www.alexa.com, combines Google's approach to results with Amazon's marketing techniques. When you visit a site from Alexa's result lists, you see a thumbnail preview, rankings, reviews, topic clusters, and a note about its unique clusters: "people who visit this page also visit... "
Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim.
Her e-mail address is joyce.valenza@phillynews.com.
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