Visualization Takes One Step Forward

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who worked at BCG asked me to check out Groxis and a few other products that help organize and visualize search results.  Shortly after we spoke there was an article in the Economist (June 19^th 2003) covering information visualization.  The sub-head was “Information visualisation is about to go mainstream. While it may not be the killer application some expect, “infoviz” is going to help users to manipulate data in wholly new ways”.  We’re still pretty far from mainstream, but the latest version of Grokker, which sits on top of Yahoo! search, is a significant step towards more widespread use for certain types of searches.  The challenge is that using Grokker requires a change in user behavior – your eyes can’t quickly scan search results – and the results do not appear nearly as quickly as they would on Google.  So you enter your search terms and wait for the thing to Grok and then you use your mouse to rollover on the metadata for each result.  While it probably helps you avoid clicking on irrelevant results, all this takes time.  Changing user behavior to something slower will be a tough path.