Kartoo +

I've had a look at Kartoo & done a few searches. It does not greatly appeal to me. I find it visually unappealing, with its quirky cartoon characters & although I can see the value of clustering results, I don't find the graphics used here easy to look at. The print is quite small too. I guess younger kids might find it attractive.

I'm quite used to the linear format of Google & for the time being I'm quite happy to continue using it. I also quite enjoy making tangential connections myself from what I find, rather than having a search engine always serving me up its recommended connections.

I've explored a few other Web 2.0 search engines. flickrstorm is great for getting photos on a particular subject directly from flickr & you can save them in a 'tray if you wish. Vdoogle searches multiple video sites & it's good to find things from sites other than the ubiquitous youtube.

Whonu which is described as having the nearest to a semantic web searching capacity is pretty remarkable in that it returns results for an asked question based on that query, rather than just the keywords, where most search engines still operate only on keywords. I'd been talking with a colleague about chocolate & slavery, so asked the question "why use slaves for producing chocolate?" & some very pertinent & useful sites were returned. I was impressed! Roll on semantic web!