Digital Research Tool Box: Touch Graph

In my previous post on search visualization, I cited a couple examples of search engines that examine link knots, or clusters of sites and pages organized around a similar theme.

I’d like to go into more detail on each of the three, since they each approach search visualization slightly differently.

The first site I’ll look into is TouchGraph. The site has Java applets for mapping link knots on either Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Using the Google applet, I typed in one of my favorite topics “crowdsourcing” (see a previous post on crowdsourcing here) and hit the Graph It! button.

What you get back are groupings of visual clusters, with each cluster representing groups of links that are related to a particular aspect of crowdsourcing. There are blog sites, articles, companies who specialize in crowdsourcing applications, etc.

I then click on the + symbol that was around a blog post on ReadWriteWeb that provided an overview of crowdsourcing. Another group of links popped up that were directly related to that particular post, one of which was a post that appeared in Mashable about Cambrian House, a software developer with a “crowd-sourced” based development strategy .

By expanding again on the Cambrian House post, I can see another cluster of related links, this time focused on Cambrian House itself. So you can see how this can go on and on and on….

TouchGraph as a research tool not only shows you relevant links to a particular topic, it does it in a very visually appealing way.

The interface is a little slow and take some getting used to, but the reward is that you can visualize information in a much broader context than you currently can do with Google today.