Saturday, August 16, 2008

Freebase Parallax: a New Way to Search the Web

With the growth of information on the web, Google and Wikepedia searches, once viewed as novel and sophisticated, now seem fairly simplistic as they search only one query at a time. Work on the Semantic Web has been underway for some time to navigate the growing amount of data on the web in ways that are more usable through more intelligible interfaces. So move over Google and Wikipedia; here comes Freebase Parallax! Using the slogan “Don't just search for one thing! Explore a whole set of related things together!”, it is a new way to search the web.

A recent article on ZDNet entitled The Future of the Web describes how Parallax, a novel browsing interface, can make contextual connections with machine readable data for richer search result sets which in turn can display visual representations of the search results. Describing how the semantic web works is not easy. Fortunately, David Huynh, who designed Parallax, has made a video that is a useful, clear demonstration of the enormous promise and power of the future of knowledge sharing. Parallax is truly an amazing product that allows for complex web searching more simply and in far fewer steps than Google and Wikipedia. Check out this video by David Huynh posted on Vimeo at http://vimeo.com/1513562.


Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.


Try the Parallax search interface here, using “Foreign donations to 2008 US Political Candidates “as a search query. At this point the interface is still slow. But ultimately this kind of searching will have a major impact on the future of searches in large enterprises.

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