Monday, February 11, 2008

Kartoo - the most bizarre search engine ever

For sheer quirkiness, Kartoo.com would score ten out of ten.

On first look it looks and feels like many search engines. But once the keywords are entered all hell breaks loose.

This the result for "london berlin flight":


Kartoo describes itself as a visual meta search engine - which is correct, in some respects.

The user interface displays results in a kind of tag cloud/map environment, where users can select a result and then be deep-linked into the source site.

Hover over a link and additional information appears on the left hand site with links elsewhere into the site.

The site looks and feels, in some respects, like the product of a mad brainstorming session over a few bottles of wine - but is actually quite addictive. Which is obviously the point...

But we probably haven't done it justice in our description, so the best thing to do is go and play with it and report back here in the comments section.

NB: some further detail on the chaps behind Kartoo is availabile on Wikipedia.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice one.

although any search engine has to go a long way in the bizarre / addictive stakes to beat Ms Dewey.

Anonymous said...

I think they exist (french Cie) since 10 years ;-)

unfortunatly, they don't have big evolution since the begining

Travolution Blogger said...

Mark: oh my goodness...!!

Travolution Blogger said...

Claude: i think it is strangely addictive i must say!!

Richard Hartigan said...

As well as Ms Dewey, there is MSN's other venture the field of visual search, Tafiti

Anonymous said...

That Ms Dewey search is just erm weird, and quite annoying too.

Travolution Blogger said...

Darren: Our benchmark of consumer opinion, Mrs Travolution, was none too impressed either.