Zoetrope: Next Generation of Search Brings Fluid Motion to the Internet

The Internet is a very unruly place and even the best search engine can do little dampen the commotion. There is a staggering amount of content on the Web and very few effective ways to make it useful or accessible.

While it may come as a shock, the results of even the most sophisticated search algorithms are still, well ... unsophisticated.

Zoetrope works by placing  a "lens" over a Web page, or even a specific section, extracting the code and allowing users can watch how it changes over days, weeks or even hours. Nothing is lost and users are able to compare relationships between information over time, allowing users to view the history of a Web site the way a magazine reader thumbs from page to page.

Currently, when we enter a search term into Google, Ask.com or my new fav, SearchMe, what we get are results based on text and images that match our search query and not much else. And for all hoopla of Web 2.0 and beyond, we still browse the Internet one page at a time, which is like looking for books in a giant library and using the card catalog.

"Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today," University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral candidate, Eytan Adar, told Science Daily. Adar is part of the Zoetrope team that included students and researchers at the University of Washington as well as Adobe.

According to Adar, users only get results from the day they are searching when they, but the picture changes every day. Information that isn't  immediately seen is "lost," every time a Web page such as the BBC updates its front page.

Michael Martinez of SEO Theory writes, "Once implemented, the Zoetrope algorithm will make every known state of a Web site available to searchers, unlike Internet Archive, which requires that you retrieve URLs based on dates and then scan the documents manually."

The name zoetrope comes from a popular 19th century toy that was  precursor to animation. The illusion of fluid motion was created when viewers looked at a series of still images placed on the inside of revolving cylinder. By twirling the cylinder and looking at the images through slits cut in the sides, it would look as though a horse was galloping or a top was spinning.

The Zoetrope algorithm works the same way by bringing life to static pages.

A demonstration Video on the [University of Washington Website] shows a user named Sally checking gas prices on the site gasbuddy.com over several weeks. With zoetrope, Sally is able to track a simultaneous spike in gas prices in May and a dip in crude oil prices. With a news aggregator, she correlates the price wobbles with a vote in Congress on spending for the Iraq War. Looking at the information over time and side by side, Sally hypothesizes that the vote in Congress caused the change in the price of gas.

"There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call 'the today Web' that it's kind of amazing that there's no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web," said Dan Weld in ScienceDay. Weld, who teaches computer science and engineering at University of Washington and also contributed to Zoetrope.   

Zoetrope is a powerful and intuitive new technology that shows us just how much room Internet has left to evolve.