Visual Search Engine - Grokker

Lately I've been playing with a new search engine technology called Grokker. We've all had our problems with Google and every other search engine out there...and the next year or so will be an interesting time as new search engines start to come to market.

Why should you care? Everyone searches for some sort of information everyday. Whether trying to remember where you left your car keys or the name of your 2nd grade teacher...you are conducting mental searches for information all the time. In fact, your brain is one of the most amazing search engines there is. Searching on the web is a different story. People have been searching for the holy grail of search since the early days of the internet. The one service that was fast, reliable, and scalable. Now that the Internet has grown to tens of billions of static web pages and 10X more information retrievable through dyanmic searches (like the US Census website), finding a way to efficiently manage and find answers in this information maelstrom is becoming more and more important.

Google was supposed to be the holy grail. It quickly became the undisputed leader in search (using pure hits as the metric) after it launched in 1998. However the quality of Google's search results has started to significantly decrease over the course of the past year. Ever a darwinian process, spammers and internet marketers have been able develop ways around Google's algorithms and now many search results pull up useless or cluttered information.

Try searching for “Dell Computer” on Google. It has changed over the course of the past day, but you’ll notice that in the top 5 links at least 1-2 of them are way off. I got results that landed me on the webpage of a German firm. This indicates to me (and to many others in the search community) that Google is having some real problems stabilizing their service.

So what's next? This is the first in a series of posts examining new search engine companies like Grokker. Grokker has been around for almost a year, but its latest release (Grokker 2.0) is what has generated buzz.

On the Grokker site they claim that you will "never wade through unorganized lists of search results again. Grokker analyzes each of your results and groups them visually so that you can understand and manage information easily." The picture gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like when you search.

Pros:
- Breaks searching down into visual topical categories
- Allows you to save searches (called saved maps)
- Also searches your computer for documents and files
- Filter searches by domain or source
- Navigation is done via the program and not by clicking on webpage links

Cons:
- Search time is 5-10X greater than any regular text-based search engine
- The categories are not specific enough and the information requires too much time to process
- Doesn’t have a toolbar and thus is not integrated into my regular web usage
- Requires start-up as a separate program (again not part of my regular usage)
- The interface if confusing and non-trivial

Grokker was built for the serious internet enthusiast, not your everyday web searcher. I use Google 50-100 times a day and there is absolutely no way I want to start-up Grokker every time I’m doing a search. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I’d much rather see 10 quick text links that I can quickly skim rather than a large map of circles and squares.

I think Grokker is an example of a great idea that won’t be able to turn into a great opportunity. Sure they will be able to get early adopters to try the service, but I wouldn’t bet on them converting more than 10% of these early adopters to paid subscribers. Since there is no advertising on Grokker their current business model will never work while free search engines still exist.

One possibility is that they use the algorithms they have developed (which do a great job of building topical categories instead of keyword categories) to build a text-based search engine with the traditional syndicated search and advertising revenue model.

You can download a free version of Grokker here.

My next post (coming soon!) will be on another visual search company called Kartoo.