The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser? allows you to visually explore data gathered by doing "related:starting.url" queries from google. This works best for relatively popular sites for which strong relations have been found, but relatively obscure sites can produce good graphs as well. So far, the best use for this tool seems to be for finding "cliques" of related sites, i.e. groups of sites that are tightly related together. One can then explore the area around a clique to find other related cliques. Although this experiment has not yet been performed, one might expect that there also exist cliques of cliques, suggesting a fractal structure of link density consisting of nested clusters.

Here is a screen shot of the TGGoogleBrowser generated after expanding some of the nodes around mp3.com Here you can see mp3 players clustered at top left, vendors at top right, news + broacasters on the bottom right, and search engines on the bottom left.

To use the TGGoogleBrowser, double click on nodes to get more links, and wait until the little red tag indicating the range of links being fetched disappers. You can also add new starting url's by entering the URL in the "Add URL" field up top, and pressing enter (again, wait for the data to load). Click on the little "H" which appears on mouse over to see a description of the link + a clickable hyperlink which will open up the desired page in a new window.

• http://touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

-- AlexShapiro - 22 May 2002

There is a plugin for TWiki TouchGraphAddOn which may incorporate the new TGGoogleBrowser code (not yet released, but soon).

-- MattWilkie - 22 Oct 2002