Graphing Web Searches with Touchgraph and Quintura
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes it isn’t. There are a couple of tools that are fun to play with and may have practical applications as well. May. First have a look at a couple of screenshots from Touchgraph and Quintura.
The Touchgraph search utility is a Java app that loads from their website and shows related pages and their degree of relatedness. This is not a link map, but more or less like the Google related pages concept. It’s pretty cool to give a visual sense of the weight of a given site and how Touchgraph thinks it fits in with the term or site you search on. The screenshot (click to enlarge) is a search on Yosemite National Park, because I’m an avid Yosemite Explorer as it were. What the screenshot doesn’t show is that there is also a sort of sidebar that lists all the related sites and gives you some info on those sites.
Quintura is a different deal. It shows the relationships between words. It is a fun idle pastime for linguists and perhaps for people who want to buy pay per click ads (i.e. Google AdWords and the like). Unlike Touchgraph, it’s a tool you download and run on your desktop.
Both of these are excellent time sponges for procrastinators and thus highly recommended. Actually, they’re more like novelties that you’ll play with for a while and discard. If you know of anything similar, please make a mention in the comments.
Tagged with: hubs • keywords • quintura • touchgraph
Filed under: SEO
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Tom, thank you for reviewing Quintura. You can use Quintura online on http://www.quintura.com as well as embed it onto your web-site by clicking Embed it! and copying & pasting an embed code onto your site page.
Thanks for the clarification Yakov. I think I forgot about the other versions, because I just downloaded the standalone and like the responsiveness of a desktop app, but I’m sure a lot of people won’t.
I think if I were a serious linguist, I would take screenshots every so often and see how machine understanding of language evolves. I suspect the “term clouds” or whatever you want to call them will get more precise and nuanced as time goes by, even if we are a long way from Star Trek interaction with a computer.