I remember visiting the French search engine kartoo a while back when it was still beta. I poked around there today and thought it was sort of interesting what they did with the place. The main interface uses flash to render the body of the search results as a visual map, using interconnected lines to form relationships with other results. In between them are subtopics with which you can filter the results, and common keywords among the search results that highlight all of those sites that share those words.
Using visual maps to present information maybe novel and different, but in the end I think the usability on this search engine really blows, simply because it doesn’t follow the way humans access page-based information: left to right movements, browsing and scanning actions. I typed in the search topic “monkey toes” and was presented with a map of the results. I had no idea what was the top returned result was, nor did I feel like slogging through the myriad of icons and graphics to find filter the results from a monkey toes search.
They do have a standard html version of the search engine. It’s definitely not as flashy, figuratively and literally, as the other mode, but it’s much more usable, except that their color scheme and font sizes makes it extremely difficult to scan the page to find what you are looking for.
Now do the same search using Google. Compare the results and notice how easy it is to scan the page Google created. Easy on the eyes. You don’t even think about it. The user experience from these sites are complete polar opposites. Google is still the shiznat.
