Information Browsing enabled by Merlot
In my last post I reported the lauch of Merlot, our new application frontend architecture. In this post I want to describe our vision for Merlot and Information Browsing. Topic Overview Pages is version 0.1 of our attempt to enable “Information Browsing”. Traditional search results pages only give you a small sample of the wealth of information on the web for your query. More importantly they dont provide you with the context surrounding your query. Others have tried to do this but they have been small in scope and been done through a manual process.
The really cool thing about what we have done is we have figured out a way to identify relationships of interest to your query. This is to facilitate your browsing of information (rather than just web pages). Our goal is to produce the best overview page for your query given the variety of information on the web and take you closer to browsing for answers rather than searching.
Here is an example: Try the query “breast cancer“. The basic information section provides you with a short overview of the common drugs, procedures, symptoms and tests but if you look at all the related topics, you will find a list of all the things we found connected to breast cancer. I dont think you can find such a comprehensive list anywhere else on the web.
Another example is “Diabetic Foot Infections”. One of the related body parts is “Achilles Tendon”. At first, I thought “Oh man! a bug”, but then I decided to click on it and found the first link to be ” Achilles Tendon Surgery Helps Prevent Diabetic Foot Ulcers”. Cool huh!!!
So chime in and let us know how you like this form of browsing and in particular if there were any interesting relationships between topics that you found on Kosmix.