TOUCHGRAPH GOOGLE BROWSER
by Michelle Bienias
Have you ever wondered which websites are most similar to your own site? We recently came across a Google Tool that blew the socks off some of the more technically-oriented people here at VRMag. Basically, the TouchGraph Google Browser Java applet shows you what the web looks like to the Google search engine. It displays links between sites and visualizes the networks of interrelated web sites.
Google ranks search results partly based upon the number and importance of links pointing to a particular page. The TouchGraph Google Browser uses Google's database to determine and display the links between a URL that you enter and other pages on the web. The results are displayed in a graph that shows both inbound and outbound relationships between URLs.
Simply type in a URL and it will show how you are graphically connected – you might be surprised to discover whom is in your “neighborhood”. Detailed instructions are available at the Touchgraph site.
But why, you may ask, is a graph any more helpful that a list of related sites? Touchgraph CTO Alex Shapiro explains that relationships aren’t always clear in a list. In a forum post, he writes: “the simple reason is that while a list shows how one item is related to 10 (or more) other items, a graph can show how all 10 items are related to the other 10 items. You get 10 times as much information in one easy to take in graph. But a tenfold increase in the amount of data shown is just a minimum estimate. Given a seed URL, the initial graph shows the 10 related pages, and the 10 pages related to each of those, so often the intitial graph contains 30 or more nodes. When you see how 30 nodes are connected to 30 other nodes, you are seeing 900 connections, or 90 times as much information as in the linear list, and you can see how this number gets much higher as you start filling up the screen.”
Since the release of the Google API in early 2002, developers have come up with other great products, such as TouchGraph's Amazon Browser, which visualizes the “also-bought” relationships of Amazon shoppers. It is also worth a look.
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