لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Hack 4. Visualize Google Results
The TouchGraph Google Browser is the perfectGoogle complement for those who appreciate visual displays of
information. Some people are born text crawlers. They can retrieve the mostly text
resources of the Internet and browse them happily for hours. But
others are more visually oriented and find that the flat text results
of the Internet leave something to be desired, especially when it
comes to search results.If you're the type who appreciates visual displays
of information, you're bound to like the
TouchGraph Google Browser (http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowserl).
This Java applet allows you to start with the pages that are similar
to one URL, and then expand outward to pages that are similar to the
first set of pages, on and on, until you have a giant map of
nodes (a.k.a. URLs) on your screen.The TouchGraph Google Browser was created by
Alex Shapiro
(http://www.touchgraph.com/). Note that what you're finding here are URLs that are
similar to another URL. You aren't doing a keyword
search, and you're not using the
link: syntax. You're searching by
Google's measure of similarity.
1.16.1. Starting to Browse
Start your journey by entering a URL on the TouchGraph home page and
clicking the "Graph It" link. Your
browser will launch the TouchGraph Java applet, covering your window
with a large mass of linked nodes, as shown in Figure 1-12.
Figure 1-12. Mass of linked nodes generated by TouchGraph
|
amuse yourself for a while just by clicking and dragging the nodes
around. But there's more to do than that.
1.16.2. Expanding Your View
Hold your mouse over one of items in the group of pages.
You'll notice that a little box with an H pops up.
Click on that and you'll get a box of information
about that particular node, as shown in Figure 1-13.
Figure 1-13. Node information pop-up box
much everything you'd get from a regular search
result. Click on the URL in the box to open that
URL's web page itself in another browser window.Not interested in visiting web pages just yet? Want to do some more
search visualization? Double-click on one of the nodes. TouchGraph
uses the API to request from Google pages similar to the URL of the
node you double-clicked. Keep double-clicking at will; when no more
pages are available, a green C will appear when you put your mouse
over the node (no more than 30 results are available for each node).
If you do it often enough, you'll end up with a
whole screen full of nodes with lines denoting their relationship to
one another, as Figure 1-14 shows.
Figure 1-14. Node mass expanded by double-clicking on nodes
1.16.3. Visualization Options
Once you've generated similarity page listings for a
few different sites, you'll find yourself with a
pretty crowded page. TouchGraph has a few options to change the look
of what you're viewing.For each node, you can show page title, page URL, or Figure 1-15.
Figure 1-15. Node mass with Radius set to 4
results (i.e., how many connections) are shown. A setting of 10 is,
in my experience, optimal.
1.16.4. Making the Most of These Visualizations
Yes, it's cool. Yes, it's unusual.
And yes, it's fun dragging those little nodes
around. But what exactly is the TouchGraph good for?TouchGraph does two rather useful things. First, it allows you to see
at a glance the similarity relationship between large groups of URLs.
You can't do this with several flat results to
similar URL queries. Second, if you do some exploration you can
sometimes get a list of companies in the same industry or area. This
comes in handy when you're researching a particular
industry or topic. It'll take some exploration,
though, so keep trying.
