Groxis Inc. has brought the Grokker Internet research tool to the Mac OS X (10.2 and higher) and leveraged the Safari Web browser’s software development kit (SDK) for high performance “Web Grokking.” It’s the company’s first Mac product.
Grokker is designed to offer search capabilities beyond a Web browser-search engine combination, which were designed mainly to display a page of information at a time. The Groxis tool can display thousands of pages of data via “information maps.”
Grokker maps can be navigated, browsed, filtered, and saved. In fact, you can save 2,000 results from a search (Grokker Pro will allow 15,000), with all the subcategories, and open it again later. You can filter by date, by relevance, by name, language, type of organization, and more. Once Grokker maps have been published on a Web site, they can be linked to other Grokker maps on other sites.
If you write books, articles, papers, and more you’re probably researching constantly. Using Grokker you could store all your research bookmarks in one map or a series of maps. Think of it as having an encyclopedia of the Web that’s organized by search topics of particular interest to you.
Grokker can also map your hard drive to help you control, edit, sort, and search files on your own hard or a shared hard drive over a network. You can even send Grokker maps to others for collaboration. Or you can use maps to present at conferences and meetings. You can open up a map, point, and the underlying document or URLs will open up with a mouse click, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or streaming video.
“We’re pleased with our first Mac release, and have much more in store for the future, including support for Panther,” said Jean-Michel Decombe, chief technical officer of Groxis.
Grokker is integrated with Safari because Safari loads pages more quickly than any other Mac Web browser and uses the advanced interface technologies underlying Mac OS X to provide a better view of the Web, he added.