Shortly after your first Internet experience, you realize that you're going to need to get a little help finding stuff. Hot links and directories are good, but sometimes you just need to find that ideal website yourself.

Most people cut their teeth on the search engine that comes packaged with your web browser. In some cases, this is the Netscape search page; in others, it's the MSN search utility.

Feeling adventurous, you strike out on your own and experience some of the other engines. Altavista, Google, Lycos, Hotbot, and so on. All of these are excellent search engines with a lot of money and effort expended to give you the best results and present advertisers with opportunities to advance their content to the top of the search results.

Then, like walking into a Sunday Buffet, you discover meta Search engines where you're not limited to one search engine; you can have them all. Places like Dogpile or Metacrawler work under the premise that they "search the search engines". So, if one search engine is good, searching them all is even better.

All of the search engines and techniques are wonderful and really do help you weave your way through the web that is the Internet. However, they all try to prioritize their results so that you see the top 10 "hits" for your search criteria. In other words, they take a "web" and attempt to present the results in a linear fashion.

Enter the new kid on the block, Kartoo. The premise is still the same, you enter a search term or terms and get results. As with all search engines, the better your terms, the closer to the ideal webpage that you get.

Then, Kartoo does something different. Instead of presenting the results in a linear manner, your screen displays an array of websites that are all graphically linked to show the relationship among them using some key terms or expressions.

With this search, I looked for GEC Computers in the Classroom. You'll see that there are a number of Internet sites that have links to our site. The "relevance" is shown by the size of the node and the concept that ties them together is illustrated by the visual linking. On the left side, you are afforded the opportunity to add additional search terms to try to narrow your search.

It really is a great concept and shows you that the Internet is not a linear resource, but rather a series of interconnected resources.

Kartoo is also customizable. You'll notice that this display is in Greater Essex teal with ribbons linking the sites. I think it does a wonderful job of demonstrating the results of an internet search in a different fashion. Kartoo also lets you put a search box right on your own webpage, with your preferences. I put one on the GEC Computers in the Classroom page, for convenience.

I highly recommend bookmarking this site and adding it to your set of strategies for searching the Internet!

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