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Cool New Australian Search Engine

"Have you Mooter'd that yet?" You probably haven't heard that question as often as "Have you Googled it?", but Mootering just might become part of web searching vocabulary.

Mooter (http://www.mooter.com.au) is a new search engine, developed by Liesle Capper, an Australian with a background in psychology and a passion for building "a powerful tool for finding our way around the information world: a tool that does not impose value on us, but helps us find our own meaning."

What sets Mooter apart is its organisation of results. Rather than the traditional ten-web-sites-on-a-page format, Mooter's search results display in a graphical format, with the search terms in the centre and seven conceptual "clusters" radiating out from the centre. Additional clusters are available by clicking the [next clusters] link. Note that the same web site may appear in more than one cluster.

Mooter emphasizes its ability to watch which sites you click on, and then reorganise the search results to surface the most relevant sites, based on your prior selections. The theory is that, rather than just gauging relevance by link popularity or frequency of term occurrence, the most relevant results can be best calculated by learning what the searcher finds most useful.

This "psychological modelling", as Mooter describes it, helps to disambiguate search queries; when you type in the phrase "Harry Potter", are you interested in the book series, the movies, video games, the author, or unofficial sites built by fans of Harry Potter? By seeing how you review the clusters and which sites you click through to, Mooter attempts to figure out what you are REALLY looking for, and recalculates the relevance of the retrieved sites and reorders them accordingly.

One somewhat unexpected consequence of Mooter's on-the-fly reordering of search results is that, if you click on a link from a search results page and then use your browser's BACK function to return to the results page, the results will have been re-ordered, based on your last selection. That means that the search results never look quite the same twice. A work-around for this is to always open a link in a new window (with Internet Explorer, right-click on the link you want to view, and select "Open in New Window"). Of course, this deprives you of the instant recalculation of relevance that is Mooter's strong suit.

Keep in mind that Mooter is still in beta. There aren't any help files, nor is there an advanced search option, and some of the results are still a little quirky. But this is a search engine with a lot of promise. Try Mootering your next few searches and see how you like it.

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