Check Out the Web’s Hidden Treasures

Kartoo, www.kartoo.com

This is a visual meta-search engine that runs a query against several search engines and presents the results in a graphical map. You can see excerpts from the various pages by “hovering” over them, allowing you to scan many sites without having to click through to them.

While free visual search isn’t yet fully baked, and while the server-side Kartoo isn’t as sophisticated as the client-side Grokker (see below), Kartoo is an intriguing early glimpse of how search may evolve in the next few years.