Search This is an HTML Data Visualization that allows users to explore websites and search queries within a live 3D environment.
I’ve often been disappointed by search engines and the way in which results are displayed within them (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). Plain text doesn’t allow users to explore the web and users often never click to see further results beyond the first query page. This makes humans more dependent on machine algorithms and less apt to uncover relevant, interesting, and connected content. My projects displays HTML data in a textured 3D environment with 2.5D navigation. URL’s can be queried and thus display all the connections within it. Visually it’s interesting to view the proportion of internal and external links within a site and where they can potentially lead you. I developed the program in Java/Processing and hope to put it online in the near future.
When I showed my ICM class this project I received a positive reaction. Phil Groman suggested that I use Facebook Connect to allow users to explore friend data rather than HTML data. I thought this was a great suggestion and thought it might be a nice way to visualize feed data and favorite friend activities through the Facebook API.
Overall, I still feel HTML data can be visualized in a more interesting way and plan to continue to explore alternative methods of 2.5D and 3D data representations. I also feel that learning Regex could help greatly in creating a smarter data analysis and more universal searching system. This project was on display at the 2011 ITP Winter Show.
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