Oliver_Henniges - 8:28 pm on Oct 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

I took a quick look at clusty and the idea of presenting some additional information on how a given search term is embedded into the nodes of the net doesn't seem too bad to me. However, like in most cases, such early approaches often reveal funny results.

But I immediately assoiciated a GUI-based application. I don't have the source at hand, but recently I came across a site which offered a flash-based graphical display of the related:#*$!!-search query on google (they kept the results of the link:xxx-search for themselves I presume). Maybe one of the next generation of search engines presents its results as an image map with the old netscape wheel at the bottom, showing the site names plus the way these sites are embedded into their cluster.

On the other hand I must insist on obeying the hint towards semantics, which glengara brought into the discussion. I mean beginning with aristotle people tried to bring order into kowledge, even fought wars about this. Think of these endless discussions within (at least the german branch) of DMOz about how to structure various categories. Do you really think this might be done by an algorithm? It might be done on a statistic basis, it might be done by the number of backlinks like google does now, but i yet don't see any way it might be done concerning "meaning." And if it claims to do, I am looking forward to seeing its search results on querying for "meaning."