[LINK] Fwd: Kartoo visual discovery engine

[Robin Whittle]

I tried searching http://www.kartoo.com for "slinky" to see how easily
it came up with my site.

I was highly suspicious of its bullshitty consumer video-game
appearance, and the cartoon figure in centre screen makes me want to
close the window and get out of there - as I usually feel when I
encounter a site which runs on Flash.

But it does did some interesting and useful things, providing a menu of
sub-topics, such as "Physics" and a network of interconnected sites and
topics which I didn't quite see the significance of.  Clicking on the
Physics topic in the middle created a new set of things (after the damn
cartoon character again) and my site was listed.  Putting the cursor
over it lead to a text description from my Sliiiiiiiinky page and some
words around it lit up.  Clicking on it opens a browser window, with a
damn personal toolbar turned on (N4.77 Win2k) and my site is there.

There are multiple maps.   

Why are the maps circular (other than in a poxy attempt at being like an
MP3 player, or music-playing software, which generally aspire to be
circular for some reason or orther)?

Why is it done in Flash, rather than Java?

This means we can't have a URL for the maps or search results - this
greatly impoverishes the user, since they have to tell someone about it
by "Search for Slinky, then click on Physics in the central diagram and
thin go to Map 4 in the Physics section".

Some of the action is reflected in the search terms on screen, but get
this: you can't copy from it or paste into it.  There's no right-click
to copy link URLs or open things in new browser windows.

Things which happen in Flash happen in their own inaccesible space. 
There is no URL for them.


These are the sort of reasons why I still think Flash should be avoided!

As always, in my experience, sites which use Flash suffer from the
designers putting more effort into shallow appearances.  Whether or not
their site every had anything useful and interesting or not, Flash
detracts from its utility by distracting, by being incompatible (for
instance I can't print these pages at all) and typically by involving
long downloads for nothing but time-consuming fluff.

This is pretty much the first time I have seen a site use Flahsh for
something functional, but it makes a mess of it.  Surely a Java-based
system would have been more useful and industry-standard, for instance
at least enabling copy and paste.

The FAQ says there is an HTML version, but there is no way I can see of
selecting it in the Options I had available.

Later, after rerunning Netscape after something (suspected this Kartoo
Flash thing) made it flaky and left a Netscape process running after I
exited Netscape, and after I killed that process . . .  I got
http://www.kartoo.net which redirected to a page:

  http://www.kartoo.com/detectfl.php3?lp=2

from which, if you are quick, you can select an HTML and a "text"
version which really leads to the same thing:

   http://www.kartoo.com/en/kartoo.html

This also enables me to select "Physics" but there is no indication in
the resulting page that that Physics is not part of my search term.  But
this was with Netscape 4.77.  With a recent Mozilla, the resulting page
did have physics in the search term box.


So the HTML version seems to do the basic things the "cartographic"
version does.   But the Flash version looks sophisticated and useful -
and it just seems to waste time learning its non-standard interface and
discovering that it doesn't seem to do much.

Kartoo is one of many meta search engines listsd at SearchEngineWathch:

  http://www.searchenginewatch.com/links/metacrawlers.html

It is the last of the vaguely recommended ones.


 - Robin
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