FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
Google shares search visualization tool
Mon, 9th May 2011
FYI, this story is more than a year old

On its blog today, Google announces Search Globe - a new way of visualising search results from around the world.

"The Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors. You'll see a bright landscape of queries across Europe, and parts of Asia for instance, but unfortunately we see many fewer searches from parts of the world lacking Internet access—and often electricity as well—like Africa. We hope that as the Internet continues to become more accessible over time and people continue to ask questions, we'll see this globe shine brightly everywhere." 
The globe only categorises search by location and language at the moment, but Google is making Search Globe open source, meaning developers can take the code and apply it in new ways. It will be interesting to see what people will do with it.

You'll need a WebGL-enabled browser, like Chrome, to view Search Globe.