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It's been 25 years since a group of students introduced Archie, the world's first Internet search engine. Since then, search engines have become smarter, faster, and more personalized. Their objectives, however, have remained mostly the same.
"What people use search engines for is what search engines are made for," said Douglas Downey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "Search engines are very good at finding specific Web pages. We wanted to design a search engine that does something very different — one that helps you explore concepts."
On June 16, Downey and his team launched a beta version of Atlasify, a new search engine that does more than respond to queries. It invites users to explore new concepts by automatically generating cartographic "atlases" about subjects of interest. The project is a collaboration with University of Minnesota assistant professor Brent Hecht, who earned his PhD from the McCormick School of Engineering.
http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2015/06/atlasify-search-using-maps.html
[Related]: Blog about Atlasify
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 18 2015, @03:30PM
It gets better. Let's try this again... changed my User Agent to Chrome, and then the searchbox page came up just fine. So I typed in a test string, and got back...
Error Unable to connect to the server. Make sure you have an active internet connection and try refreshing the page in a few minutes.
Ya know, I'd expect better from "A research collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University."
[I haven't checked, but I think it must use a short-lived cookie, cuz when I tried again it knew I was spoofing user-agent.]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.