Theme -Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. A place where the user can dig into an information structure, control and effect their search, while still presented with tangental information.

Attitude - Exploratory, Interactive, Dynamic

Concept -The user interface provides tools for exploring their search results (including clustering and dynamic word maps), parallel search areas present information from different groups (books, images, froogle) and searches simultanenously, and the experience (search results and/or ranking) changes as the user makes choices.

Competitive positioning - Google is the dominant site in the search world. This dominance has lead to many imitators especialy in regard to visual design. Our approach pushes the search engine form forward and breaks away from Googles historic conservatisim in it own design. And by breaking away from their own design google will be breaking away from the pack.

Research -

visualthesaurus.com
We found the Visual Thesaurus interface's ability to grow or shrink as the user sees fit an interesting and good model for how our interface could adjust to the users needs. In addition, our dynamic word maps are inspired directly from visual thesaurus' core interface.

Find a vehicle at ford.com
Ford has devoloped a flash application that let the user dynamicly change their price range / configuration while their available car options adjust accordingly. This is our prime inspiration for froogle.

Aperture by apple
Appature will have a lupe tool that allows the user to view a small section of any image at 100%. We use this idea for our maps page, creating a tool that allows the user to see street level detail no matter how far zoomed out they are.

Fazzle.com
A search engine the retains google's currant cleanliness but adds 22 links and options. By tucking many options into a top nav bar they have freed the middle of the page to remain open like google's. Unfortunatly they have cluttered there search area a little, and the nav at the top is not as powerful as it could be. A good idea for layout.

UJIKO.com
Another search engine, this one using the metaphor of a video game, that uses clusters to group its results. The most useful lesson from UJIKO is it system of using color do represents clusters. In this way links can be in multiple clusters at the same time and the user can see where clusters overlap one another.

vivisimo.com, vs clusty.com
An interesting example of the same company with two different branded products. While vivisimo now links to clusty, it is still interesting the decisions made to create the clusty brand. While vivisimo and Clusty present basicaly the same information, search results and clusters, with the same basic layout, there are differences. Vivisimo looks a lot like google only with a yellow bar at the top. While Clusty does still use some of the same coloration as google they have added much more color to the background of the search. This simple use of color and their vernacular logo set clusty aside from other more common, ugly, bland search engines.

a9.com
a9's use of multiple panes to show parallel information is a main inspiration for this project. It gives the viewer both the abilty to browse different groupings but be inspired by serindipadus information.