Overture's Got a Research Site, Too

Search engine Overture also has its own "Labs" site in Overture Research at http://research.overture.com/research.xml . This site contains information on three different Overture projects and a link to an external project. ("Welcome to the 'slaughterhouse'"? Eeek!)

The first item is cluster graphing (and by the way, I recommend you try running all of these from IE.) If you choose this you might find yourself momentarily baffled by an odd looking picture. Run your mouse over the picture while looking at the query box below. You'll see words appearing in the query box. When you find a query that looks interesting, click on it. The picture will center on that area of the picture. From there you can zoom in and out. While I appreciate that this is supposed to be a visual representation of how search queries cluster together, I wish I could have zoomed in a bit more. As it is this doesn't inform me a whole lot.

The local search demo was much easier to use. Here you can search by keyword, city and state, or street address. Search results include a map of the area you're searching and a list of search results and how close they are to the middle of the area you're searching. A search for pizza around Beverly Hills CA found 345 results ("Grand Chocolate Pizza"?)

The Concept Discovery demo is much like a "most popular search" feature. Here you can see the most popular queries for a one-day period or the most popular queries for a seven-day period. The weekly listings went back to February, and the daily options went to the end of July.

Posted to Search Engines-Overture