Groxis

» see grokker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

grokker was a demo, not a habit. i think that is the fairest thing anyone can say about it, and it applies to almost every visual search engine of that decade. you saw a screenshot, you thought that looks like how thinking feels, you tried it once, and the next morning you typed your question into google like you did every other morning.

groxis was founded in san francisco in 2001. jean-michel decombe wrote the engine and paul hawken, better known as an environmental author, raised the first money and brought in an advisory bench. r.j. pittman ran the company as chief executive until 2006. the name came from Stranger in a Strange Land, where to grok something is to understand it so completely that it stops being separate from you, which tells you exactly how large the ambition was.

the product turned a result set into a diagram. instead of a ranked column of links, grokker clustered the results by subject and drew them as circles inside circles, each one a topic you could open to find sub-topics and finally documents. searching for a word with several meanings gave you a picture of the meanings first. it was a genuinely different proposition: the list answers your question, the map shows you what the question contains.

it collected the awards that go to things like this, DEMOgod in 2003 and a place on the Wired 100. grokker.com went up as a web version running over yahoo's index and later pulled google results in as well, and for a while the site was inside the five thousand most visited on the internet. none of that turned into a search habit, and search is a business made entirely of habits.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the first versions were a java application you downloaded, which in the early 2000s meant a splash screen and a wait while the runtime woke up. the web version arrived later and needed a plug-in for a good while. every second of that startup cost was competing against a search box that was already open in another tab and returned in under a second.

the clustering itself was done on results fetched from someone else's index. groxis never crawled the web. it took yahoo's answers, or later google's, and rearranged them. that made the whole company a layer sitting on top of an engine it did not control, and a layer with no unique data underneath it can be reproduced by the engine below whenever the engine below feels like it.

~ the funny part ~

everybody who tried grokker liked it and almost nobody used it twice. the reason is not that the visualization was bad, it is that it was answering a question users were not asking. people do not arrive at a search box wanting to survey a field. they arrive wanting one fact, and the fastest possible route to one fact is a line of text at the top of a page.

where the survey view actually did make sense was research. so groxis went there, selling the engine to EBSCO for library databases and to amgen for internal literature work. that pivot was correct and it also meant the company had left the market that could have made it large. an enterprise search vendor with a nice interface is a real business, just a small one with long sales cycles, and it does not support the funding a consumer search story attracts.

~ what it became ~

groxis stopped operating in march 2009, quietly, in a quarter when a lot of small software companies stopped operating quietly. grokker.com is live today as an unrelated wellness-video company, which is the ordinary afterlife of a good domain and is somehow worse than a parked page.

the idea did not die with the company, it just moved down the stack and lost the pictures. every time a search engine offers you refinements along the side, or splits an ambiguous name into separate people before showing results, that is clustering doing the work grokker's circles were drawing. the conclusion the whole visual-search cohort proved, from grokker through kartoo, is that users wanted the structure applied for them and did not want to look at it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »