www.qball.org would like to publicly apologize for the lack of a post last evening. However, it should be noted that thousands upon thousands of data must be filtered to bring our readers the "prime rib" of information. Thankfully, this week's DL is a great little program that everyone should try out.

This intriguing DL is a search engine. I stumbled across while reading an article which explain this interesting search engine. It is called Grokker and uses a graphically eye pleasing organization to show results of a search. What Grokker does is organize the search word into relevant topics. The example their website gives is if you searched for "Paris Hilton" meaning the hotel in that French country, Grokker separates any topics related to the hotel from the great videos out there with a person of the same name.

Here at qball.org, we do not like to use sex and flash to promote quality items, therefore let us give you another example. If you search for "glasses" you would see different categories ranging from eye glasses, safety glasses, and wine glasses. The way this is organized is by using color "bubbles" or "boxes" to separate the major categories and then works down in several layers of information until websites are available. To continue the example, if you select eye glasses, the categories that show up would be discount glasses, lenses, frames, etc.

Now, there are a few things that do not make this a complete replacement for the online search engines. For starters, there is only a trial program for 31 days before it becomes a pay to use program. Plus, this is a standalone program that must be run to get the graphic interface, but you can click on a link to launch in your browser. Finally, the searches are slower than Google, but once you get the results, it is just a matter of clicking the topics, they are all present.

There are a few other features that makes me keep using Grokker as long as possible. The organization and colors are great, and you can choose a "box" look or "circle" look with a variety of colors to find something eye pleasing to everyone. Also, Grokker has several filters to break down the data you want. There is text searching within the results, there is ranking and coloring to help see where you want to look, and there is a filter for domains to exclude those damn educational websites and such. Also, Grokker has the ability to be your search engine for your own computer to help organize files and locations. Quite a bit of features on this wonderful DL

Overall, a very organized and smooth running search. Download and try it out, who knows, you might be getting an early look at what is to come for search engines. That, or you will become obsessive with circles and organize anything in your sight day and night. Either way, I am legally not to blame.