Grokker: The Search Is On
The startup company Groxis has created colorful "knowledge maps" as an alternative to searching on the web with text-based engines such as Google. Are we ready to make the switch?

by Genevieve Ranieri

A knowledge map on Grokker.

It’s as if the computer world is about to be taken over by the late, hippie painter Bob Ross, who gained cult-like fame through his television show about landscape painting: happy, little colored spheres, like drops of paint on a palate, will adorn computer screens. But no one is discovering the joy of painting here; rather, it’s the joy of searching with Grokker software that will have people feeling as if they’ve entered a colorful data-scape.

The creation of Groxis, Inc., a Sausalito-based company founded in 2001 to provide information management and delivery solutions to other companies, Grokker is a desktop application that converts data, such as search results, e-mail, records and documents, into graphical maps.

"The basic idea is to create an innovative, universal, visual language and powerful software tool to create, explore, filter, annotate, and communicate complex systems of information," says Jean-Michel Decombe, Chief Design and Technology Officer and co-founder of Groxis, along with Chairman Paul Hawken and Chief Executive Officer R.J. Pittman.

As a query is performed, the software organizes the information, gathered from the user’s hard drive and the Internet, into clusters of circles that represent related data; within each circle are several smaller circles, representing subtopics. The result is a visual display that looks like the cross-section of a ripened pomegranate; bunches of seeds reside within separate compartments of varying size inside the fruit. According to the creators of the software, the specific query is displayed in this visual manner rather than textually because this best suits our ability to process information.

"The human mind can do a lot more when it uses visual, spatial and contextual faculties," says Groxis Chairman Paul Hawken. Based on this idea, Grokker creates "knowledge maps," search terrains the user navigates.

The idea of building upon our natural ability to visually understand and interpret information is an idea that, according to Clay Shirky, a professor in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has the potential to work well.

"Our ability to visualize is an incredibly powerful tool," says Shirky, who teaches a course called Social Weather that examines our understanding of group interactions on the Internet and ways to improve software to suit these dynamics. "By using visual tools, we are [utilizing the] stuff the brain already does very well."

The advanced capacity to visualize allows us to see images, instantly interpret what we are observing and understand the big picture. The founders of Groxis have taken this holistic approach to their software, according to Decombe, because it will allow users to comprehend large amounts of data by actually seeing the relationship different topics have with one another through a "knowledge map." Based on this idea, Grokker is derived from the word grok, from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

"It means to understand completely and wholly," says Hawken. The company’s name, Groxis, is a condensed form of "Grokking System."

According to Groxis’s operations manager Adreanne Radonich, only the preview release of Grokker is currently available at a list price of $99. Some people might be hesitant to buy the software, especially given the plethora of free search engines readily available online, such as the ever popular Google. However, the team at Groxis insists that their software is more than a search engine, and well worth the cost.

"There is no software that does what we do," says Hawken. "Doing a search that brings up ten URLs to a page is not comparable to what we do, because we are not a search engine." Hawken also suggests that many of these searches are "’free’ because there is advertising, sponsored links, and payment for click-throughs."

Hawken is referring to such common used research methods as Google, which, like many other search engines, only pulls up the first several hundred results which are categorized according to rank, or the number of hits a site gets. The more a site is visited, the higher rank it will receive and the further up it will be on the search engine’s list. Like the chicken and egg conundrum, a user will then click on the first few results, maintaining the site’s elite status at the top of the list.

"Searches are linearized. The first 10 links in Google are obviously in rank order and absolutely unfiltered," says Professor Shirky. "Particularly for multi-use words, it becomes a popularity contest among domains."

What separates Grokker from such search engines, then, is its ability to act as a navigational tool, to sort through deeper data that the typical search engines never touch upon.

An image of a particular way to utilize the Grokker software.

"With Grokker, you could have 10,000 [search results] on your map at one time, and then query within the search with granularity and finesse," says co-founder Hawken, referring to the user’s ability to sort through and refine the enormous amount of data. "You can filter by date, category, time span, source, relevance, key word, type of document, and much more."

In addition, Grokker allows users to do multiple-source searches, create their own "knowledge maps," re-organize the data and dump it onto a separate website for others to view, save it to their desktops or send to friends, and have their maps automatically updated daily, weekly or monthly.

The company itself uses a simple example on their website to illustrate the basic power of Grokker: a query on exotic vacations. The software presently uses the Northern Light search engine to collect metadata, a technical term for tags that identify Internet pages and documents. The overall map, exotic vacations, includes such circular subjects as "travel agencies," "resorts," "ecotourism" and "budget travel." Within each of these colored spheres are several other subtopics. Instantly, the user can see the different topics relating to the initial query, can scour through them, delete and rename them and ultimately conduct a search in a quicker, visually appealing manner.

The advanced version, which is expected for release in early 2003 and will be given as a free upgrade for those who already own the preview version, will feature "more datasources and search engines, larger maps, more flexible filtering, the ability to annotate, customization, as well as data source convergence," according to Decombe. Currently, the preview version only works in conjunction with the Northern Light search engine.

"The product itself will run more smoothly," says operations manager Radonich. Grokker, like most new products, has its glitches, which includes recurrent freezing and initial consumer confusion. Also, using the software effectively requires practice and further utilization of Grokker’s more advanced features will probably require a clear tutorial. Currently, though, it seems to be at the forefront as a program that visually displays search results in a well formatted and comprehensible manner.

A crop of similar programs has and continues to emerge, although few have generated the popularity or accessibility that Grokker hopes to achieve. One such visual tool is Kartoo, a program similar in concept to that of Grokker, both in design and metasearching - or relying on other sites to do the actual searching. Created by Laurent and Nicolas Baleydier and looking like a somewhat bizarre galaxy, results are displayed as orange circles, connected by thin, multicolored lines across a blue background. A similar search on exotic vacations, however, resulted in a confusing display of overlapping circles that lit up like a pinball machine gone awry. Another visual map, from TheBrain Technologies Corporation, is the WebBrain that displays information somewhat like spokes on a wheel. The program breaks the search into "parent" categories, "sibling" sub-categories of the parent categories, "jump" categories that are related to the topic, and "child" sub-categories of the topic – all written in black, connected by white lines and displayed against a blue background. As all the different categories might imply, the screen becomes overwhelmingly crowded with connecting lines and excessive information that often makes it difficult to decipher relevant topics.

"Right now, Groxis is the current high-water mark for attempts," says Professor Shirky about such search tools that have taken a visual approach to displaying data. That said, he’s not sure that Grokker will be immediately embraced, given our reliance on text-based data, and the failure of other visual search tools to gain widespread use. However, Grokker’s future looks good, since there is a sense "that the tools we have are not the right tools and [there is a] willingness to try something better."

Whether or not Grokker will become the revolutionizing software its founders hope it will be is yet to be determined. Until then, we’ll have to continue our current methods of research; spending hours scrolling through never-ending lists of colorless text.

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Genevieve Ranieri is a journalism major at NYU. Her byline has appeared in Maxim and Washington Square News, NYU's daily newspaper.

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