Galaxy It - A new way to search?
Browsing some web 2.0 blogs, I came across a site that boasts a new kind of web search. I quite like the idea since online search is one of the least researched topics from a user experience point of view I think. Yes, Google is doing a lot and refining and tweaking and tuning, but very few are thinking innovatively.
Galaxy It tries to put new life into online searching by giving you a visualization tool for searching by topics, and other classical means. It is still very much in alpha stage, so don't expect anything yet, but if the developers are thinking what I'm thinking, it could shape up to be something. Not a Google beater, but interesting nevertheless.
If you search for a term using organized mode, it will show you a 3x3 box, with your search term in the center and related topics around it. You can drag a topic to the center to then search for subtopics. I didn't really get the usefulness, until I noticed the zoom bar to the left. If you drag it to the top, it will zoom out, and to each side of the big box, you will see a 3x3 ox again, with the subtopics in the center, and actual web pages around it. If you then drag a subtopic into the center, it will reload and search for all subtopics of that topic, and display related pages. I think this is something you might have to see for yourself.
I see two problems with the service. One is purely performance and much needed development. The service is slow, pictures don't load in a great format and everything is a bit mixed up zoomed out. My second problem is contextual. If you search for "flower" pics, you presumably might want to look at pics of roses, or chrysanthemum or lilies and whatnot. Since the subtopics seem to be keyword based, the subtopics you actually have are "flower power", "flower seeds" and so on. If they can fix this, and get the engine to display meaningful categories, they may have a great engine on their hands.
This site may not be beating Google anytime soon, but it's bringing some much needed innovation to search engines. It needs a little development work, especially in the topic generation field, but I'm hoping they'll be able to show us a great product soon, so keep your eyes open!
Update: Galaxy It is no longer available.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.