Describing the internet

Article on the Newfangled Web Factory's blog. About different descriptions and analogies for the web, and how people use the web.

http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/543/view_type/950060/tagid/15

informationisbeutiful.net

Blog full of info-graphics

More Visual Search Engines

Sites that display screenshots as results

Pagebull.com

Search-cube.com

Spacetime.com

Map.net

Another old-school site similar to Yahoo3D. Map.net (which isn't a site anymore but is mentioned here) has buildings representing websites, with the biggest buildings representing the most popular sites.

Your World of Text

A collaborative experiment. Visitors can turn up and add their words and messages to a big white page. Makes more sense if you visit the site.

"Your World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor. The changes made by other people appear on your screen as they happen. Everyone starts in the same place, but you can scroll through the world using your mouse."

webtrendmap.com

another site which represents information visually.

"The Web Trend Map community curates meaningful link trends by choosing sources they trust."

www.webtrendmap.com

Yahoo 3D (1996)

This is the closest thing I can find to what I wanted to do. Information about it on the web is scarce - there's no mention of it on Yahoo's official site or even in Wikipedia. The image above is from a student paper titled "Mapping the Unmappable" published here.

The internet is represented by a 3D city which can be explored by the viewer. Each building represents a category (finance, sports, education etc) and contains several objects which represent individual websites.

Why Did it Disappear?

Yahoo 3D was launched in 1996, but today there is very little trace of it on the web. So why did it fail? One possible reason is that it seems to have been designed to deal with a small, finite number of websites - when in reality there are over 100,000,000 websites in the world. Another reason might be the same reason Google Video struggled to compete with Youtube - the lack of social networking features.

Alt Search Engines & Quintura

Debates, forums & news about alternative and lesser-known search engines. Features an article about Quintura here.

Quintura allows user to search the web using search clouds. If a user types in a word or phrase, related words & phrases are displayed in the cloud. This is accompanied by conventional google-style listings.

quintura.com