Search engines just got a little smarter and a whole lot cooler-looking with the launch of WebBrain.com, which put a graphical interface on a database of websites.
The database under WebBrain.com is actually Netscape's Open Directory Project, a human-edited search engine that lets users review and categorize sites. ODP has more than 24,000 contributors who have entered more than 1.7 million websites, divided into 260,000 categories.
TheBrain.com, the developer of the WebBrain interface, dispensed with building its own search engine and used an existing one simply to get a demonstration of the graphical interface up and running quickly.
WebBrain can be placed on top of any indexable and searchable database. It's not limited to HTML links and files, but can also index Microsoft Office documents and other files as well, making it usable on a corporate intranet.
"Our objective here is to demonstrate a superior navigation, search, and discovery capability," said Peter Fuchs, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based TheBrain.com. "The technology is designed to separate the navigation from the Web pages. Instead of the typical search, where you have long lists of textual information where you could get hundreds or thousands of search results, now you see it in a visual form."
The WebBrain.com interface is split in half, with the top part completely written in Java. It gives a Star Trek-like visual representation of the search results by category and shows all of the threads and branches from that category. As you select categories, links appear in the lower half of the screen and submenus are drawn in the upper half.
Instead of building its own database, TheBrain.com used the ODP database to demonstrate its support for others. The technology can work with any database from major vendors, including Oracle and IBM; all that's necessary is to build the connection between the interface and the data. The software is available from the single-user, Windows version, called PersonalBrain, up to enterprise-scale search engines, such as the one powering WebBrain.com.
Aberdeen Group research director Darcy Fowkes is very enthusiastic about the technology and said there is a great deal of room for TheBrain to grow and find ways into both business and consumers' hands. But she wonders if businesses will embrace its distinctive look.
"If I walk into Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus and Macy's and they all have the exact same look and layout, what's the point?" she said. "Every website not only has to help people navigate, they also have to look unique."
This counts for both commercial websites and corporate intranets.
"The company itself may have put a lot of money into its own intranet," she said. "The appeal of TheBrain is I can find anything and the interface is very elegant, but you have to get over the adoption issues, and one issue on my intranet is how my employees know who they are working for."
