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Grokker 2.0 by Groxis, Inc.- The New Search ToolGrokker 2.0
March 25, 2004  The Grokker2 is a unique clustering search tool that is installed locally on your computer and organizes information from either the web or your computer into clusters of categorized data. The system requirements are rather advanced on both the PC and Mac side with minimum operating system of Windows 2000 for the PC and Mac OSX 10.2.6 or higher. As for hardware you should have at least a Pentium III 400MHZ or higher with 256MB of RAM and for a Mac they recommend a G3 or higher also with 256MB of RAM. We tested Grokker 2.0 using a Dell Pentium 4 Processor running Windows XP with 512 MB of RAM and Grokker installed and ran its queries with no problems. The executable itself is rather large at 19.6MB and took about 2 minutes and 7 seconds on a T1 to download but this program is feature rich and action packed with lots of data refinement features and well worth the download time and computer space. The read me opens up with some basic information and is rather informative. I always like to see information on known software issues. Usability Grokker, out of the box, has the ability to search your local computer as well as popular websites including Amazon and Google. There is a “Web Search”, which is a combination search of six search engines at once (AltaVista, MSN, WiseNut, Fast, Yahoo, and Teoma.) The clustering seems to have a high priority on title tag and less on page analysis but I could be wrong and I’m sure algorithm information is not made public. The results let you search for a term and drill down to the specific category you are researching. For example if you are looking for hosting, Grokker will separate out the search results into different types of hosting such as Dedicated or Shared, Unix or Windows etc… Grokker 2.0 seems to be geared slightly towards the power user or advanced searcher or even researchers, this tool takes some initial patience to set up correctly and understand how to navigate through the results. As Grokker searches, a graphical map is built with documents gathered from the web or even your local computer. Grokker is split up into two windows, one which maps out the data on the left and a window to the right which displays the page information. The program is defaulted to open a new browser window behind the user interface so I initially had a hard time finding the results page, but a quick edit in the preferences section allowed me to pull up the results along side the clustered data map. As installed A simple edit, just go to File and under the preferences tab in the “Window” section tick on “View url’s in the Grokker” to have it pull the results within the tool itself. I thought this should have been the default setting. The “Zoom Space Controls” allows you to set the how deep Grokker searches, the greater your zoom controls the more results come up, this feature is good if you are in a hurry and would like to do a quick search or are researching a topic and would like to see all related aspects of the search topic. Grokker is especially useful for new topic discovery and understanding of related aspects about a new topic. You narrow your search results by clicking on the graphical data categories until you reach a web page or file which then loads in the browser window. At the webpage level I also had a little trouble navigating back to the main map but quickly figured out that by clicking outside the circles brought you up a level until you arrive at your main cluster. Grokker even does a great job with the common search behavior of some searchers typing in the domain name in the search box but that tends to be a beginner search technique and this is geared for a more advanced search guru. After you have completed narrowing down your search results you can save the results to revisit at a later time or send the results to another Grokker user and share your findings. This could be a great modular feature for those working together on a project or with conference and online collaboration tools such as Placeware. Below are some of the different ways you can further slice and dice your search results. Search by Domain Extension Grokker allows you to also refine your results to a specific domain extension (.com, .org, .edu) which could be beneficial if you would like to refine your search to include only universities or schools. Search Between a Range The built in “Slider Filters” are the least intuitive feature of the product and required a bit of help file reading which are rather extensive and include helpful examples and screenshots. This feature can limit your search to specific ranges. For example, you can ask to display only the results from a certain date or find all items that cost less than a certain price. This would be useful for comparison shopping. You can refine or expand the search by moving the slider to the left or right. Just another great data refinement tool for the power searcher. Search by Individual Search Engine Within Grokker’s internal browser you can use the tool as a standalone browser and navigate to any site or specialty engine of your choice or you can refine your results to one of the 6 or more search engines built into Grokker which of course includes Google. Filtering Tool Filter out keywords of your search to further refine the results and Grokker will automatically remove the results that do not contain the filtered word, refinement within refinement. The browser on the right also highlights the keywords for you as you visit each page. Shop Search With the Amazon plug in you are able to search for products on Amazon and narrow your selection down to only the categories that contain your search term, you can further filter your results by price and customer rating. Stand Alone Browser If you are not in the mood to be mapping out data or simply want to type in a domain name or just want a quick linear search you can use Grokker as a stand alone browser. For PC it incorporates Internet Explorer and for Mac it uses Safari 1.0 or higher. Benefits One of the biggest differences with the Grokker search for me was that I was seeing relevant information from sites I had never visited before, that may have been buried deep in a normal linear search result. This will become more important as more and more search engine marketers maintain dominance in top rankings of the major search engines, combined with the search engine results mimicking each other out of fear of being different from the Google Gods. Engine share is really limited to the first 20 results some say the first 3, so what chance do you have at page 20 or even worse page 120. With Grokker you are seeing relevant data come up based more on how you refine your search and less on search engine tactics used by SEO marketers. Possible Enhancements Here are some wish list items I would like to see in future versions of Grokker. Would be nice to have the ability to parse out info by natural and sponsored ads. Sometimes your looking for information and don’t want the sponsors to show up and other times your ready to buy and and are looking out for sponsored ads because you know they are selling something. This would be especially beneficial with engines that sprinkle their paid listings within their organic results, making it impossible for the user to differentiate paid from natural. Would be nice to see more engines available such as Inktomi or even better allow you to dynamically add the search engine of choice. Should provide spell check and synonyms database to help out those chronically poor spellers such as myself. Include a built in RSS (real simple syndication) reader so I can download all my xml feed subscriptions and search all in one tool. Should be able to unlock the tool bar filtering sections (rank, domain, source, address bar etc) and move them around a bit like you can in Internet Explorer, this would allow the user to customize the interface to what’s most comfortable. I would also like so see some additional shopping plug-ins for popular shopping portals such as Froogle and Yahoo Product Find. With the stand alone browser and ability to search Google Grokker will find a permanent place on my desktop, I think Grokker will be a must have for academic field such as researchers and students as well as a useful business tool. |
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