Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I posted a story here a while back about Kartoo. Its really a pretty cool search engine that provides mapped results. The competition is pretty tough (nobody can poke Google with a pencil), but this is an innovative concept that just might make it through. A Kartoo marketing rep recently contacted me and sent me the company line, it is being posted here because this in one of the only times anyone ever USED the "contact" form here at TotSP and that impressed me (rather than bombarding the inbox directly).

Kartoo...web mapper !!!

Kartoo is a new generation meta-search engine providing an exceptionally innovative
visual way to retrieve and display information from the web. The Kartoo technology
has been under development for two years and www.KartOO.com is it’s first ‘proof of
concept’ application.

A key Kartoo innovation is displaying Web sites identified by a search on a
strikingly visual map; individual sites are represented by balls, with their size in
proportion to how relevant they are to the search query. The balls are connected
together by dynamic semantic links (e.g. the semantic link between daewoo.com and
renault.fr is "car manufacturer"). Clicking on the link allows to add or subtract
the theme to the initial search request, and Kartoo translates the syntax depending
on which search engines are activated.

Laurent Baleydier, the designer of Kartoo, set himself the goal of developing a
powerful meta-search engine that would help internet users precisely tune their
information searching through a very intuitive interface, with no need for them to
master the Boolean processing units. The Kartoo search software provides several
significant advantages:

The Kartoo software resides online, and requires no prior software downloading.
Kartoo includes a multilingual interface (English, French, and coming soon Spanish
and Portuguese).
Web sites are classified according to a proprietary algorithm that emphasizes the
sites most relevant to your search.
The Kartoo software automatically selects the most pertinent search engines based on
a specific search query.
Search results are displayed in a visually precise information map.
Kartoo's search software supports advanced search functions (URL, near, domain,
images). Kartoo also allows you to choose the graphic environment in which selected
sites appear. The visual graphic results display can be modified: background color,
representation of semantic links, and moving from a cartographic mode to a
"standard" mode with a list of brief descriptions. Maps can be stored locally and
forwarded.

Few software products are marketed solely as a public search engine, and Kartoo is
no exception. They offer several products for commercial market: intranet, portal,
thematic (software research, finance, medical), and digital TV. Kartoo's strongly
supports competitive intelligence information acquisition through its capability to
identify and elegantly display complex relationships between topics and company

  kartoo