By Burt Lum

The first commercial human-to-computer interface was the command line.

Do you remember back in the early days of personal computing when everything needed to be typed in following the c:\> prompt?

Things were much more rudimentary then. User-friendliness had not yet evolved to the point where the graphical interfaces allowed the user to visualize what was happening with the computer.

Imagine what surfing the Web might have been like if you were restricted to only text and a command line. It's hard enough nowadays to remember your navigational path through the Web.

Twenty something years later, thanks in large part to Apple Computer, which pioneered an operating system that was visual and intuitive, almost everything has a graphical user interface.

These days you can search in two dimensions and visualize your results at www.kartoo.com.

Kartoo is search engine that queries several other search engines, calculates a relevance factor, correlates associated links and displays them in a two-dimensional interactive map.

Although I'd be hard pressed to give up my Google, I did find Kartoo a captivating exploration tool. On the fly, it will generate a Flash map of your search results. The links are depicted as circles, each varying in size depending on relevance.

Between the circles are key words that show links between the different Web sites.

As an experiment, I did a search on the word Kaho'olawe. It returned the main sites associated with the island, such as the sites for Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana, the Navy and the Kaho'olawe Island Reserve Commission. Interestingly, it also included sites from the University of Hawai'i and several tourist sites, such as Hawaii.com, Hawaiipineapple.com and kahoolawe.wheretostay.com.

The results were not unlike the results from a Google search, but unlike the Google results, Kartoo attempts to provide common themes that link the Web sites. In the query on Kaho'olawe, common themes between sites included, land, remote, island, nature and reserve. With these word associations, you appreciate the interrelatedness of the Web and start to see how all things are connected. As this technology develops, I would imagine three-dimensional maps and surfing through meta-tags and thematic corridors. ;-)

Reach Burt Lum at www.brouhaha.net.