Until I met my business partner Pat Byrne some seven years ago I wasn’t really a ‘visual person’ – I much preferred numbers and written explanation. Pat changed that because whenever he explains something he has a habit of drawing it, and I’ve developed the same habit. I still like numbers and the written word, but I find visualisations useful.

Take for example search engines that present information as cluster maps. TouchGraph is one engine, although the free version only searches Google. Similarly the free version of Grokker only searches Yahoo. Now it’s an interesting exercise to compare the output on the search term “network analysis”. Immediately below is the TouchGraph map.

This map is in the form of a force spring diagram. Personally I like these types of diagrams. Apparently the underlying algorithm maps similar pages. Similar pages do not directly represent inbound or outbound hyperlinks, but rather pages with like content. Note some nodes have a circle around them with a series of links from them. The central node, or halo as TouchGraph calls it, serves to cluster like with like. As you would expect you can click on a node and it will take you to the underlying site.

Now look at the Grokker map shown below. It’s an entirely different presentation, but in my opinion is equally effective, and arguably cleaner. In this case like is clustered together in “sub-categories”. The larger circles have more results, and the blue nodes have another level of underlying detail. It’s also possible to display the website URLs as a list alongside the map.

In the free version of Grokker it’s not possible to begin with a website URL, however this is possible in TouchGraph. The visualisation below shows the first output for the URL to this site - Knowledge Matters™. 

Now look at the output from Walk2Web . This engine is quite clever. The footprint represents my site, and the nodes some links that are either incoming or outbound from my site, rather than pages that Google assesses as similar. When you click on a node it provides a view of the page, literally reads the title and description of the page, and presents the latest feed if any on the site. It’s still a bit quirky for my liking, but I can see why some people would like it.

So what’s the point? Well I think search visualisation is the future of information search, because it gives addition cues for sense making. There is still a way to go, but we are already marching down the path. The examples above are some of the scouts, but are there are plenty of followers emerging. I for one will be watching these developments with interest because increasingly visualisation matters!

Regards, Graham