Grokker Search App Moves to the Web

This Monday Grokker released the newest version of their search app, Groxis. This is a new approach for Grokker which had previously offered Groxis as a downloadable application. The new Grokker is 100% web-based and uses Yahoo to provide search results.

Grokker is one of a handful of visual search applications that came out over the last several years offering an alternative to the Google-style text heavy search results available elsewhere. Most visual search apps organize your search results into categorized groupings of content usually represented by circles.

The upside to visual search is clear when you search for something like Jaguar. Did you mean the car? The cat? Or did you mean the Operating system? With Grokker, you just click the circle that says "Cars" and your results are refined. Try the same search on Google or Yahoo and you will be clicking and typing and sifting more than you'd like.

Grokker is also using Alexa to provide the site thumbnail images. When you click on a site, a pane on the right side of the screen refreshes to show info about the site, including the thumbnail image.

Here are some other visual search engines. They have a lot of neat (if sometimes odd) ideas for how search can be improved. Give them a try:

Grokker
Kartoo
Mooter

Reach history graph of Grokker, Kartoo and Mooter: Link.