Welcome everyone! In this article, I’ll try to briefly introduce you to the amazing Carrot2 Clustering Engine. I don’t know about you, but I only found out about this tool a couple of days ago and I thought it was worth sharing it.
So,
###What is Carrot2?
Carrot2 is an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine. It can automatically organize small collections of documents (search results but not only) into thematic categories.
– Official Carrot2 Website
What does this mean? Well, let me show you:
You’ll be greeted with this quite simple and straight forward homepage.
Let’s try searching for 0x00sec.
As you can see in the green rectangle, we have 3 viewing options: Folders (picture above)
Circles
And FoamTree.
As I’ve highlighted in the first image, there are a few topics that immeadiatly caught my interest, those are:
-
A website (0x00sec.org)
-
Topics related to that website
-
A related website (P^3)
Side Note numero uno: In the Folders option, the topics are ordered by relevance (most relevants come first); In the Circles option, size = relevance (bigger = more relevant); The FoamTree option follows the same logic as Circles.
Side Note numero dos: Of course there will be some topics that are little or not at all related to what you’re trying to find, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m not very interested in “SEC Men’s Basketball Championship”.
Side Note numero tres: For the rest of this post, I’ll be using the Circles option.
As I have previously stated, the website is the most interesting topic, so let’s follow the rabbit!
On the right end corner you see the ‘search for more like this option’. We click it, and the website returns us the search result for 0x00sec.org
Now, we see that a lot of the topics the search returns are titles of posts or categories within this website (we know that because, well, we are the users of this webiste. However, someone doing proper research would have to spend some time reviewing and analyzing each topic and link).
This pretty much covers Carrot 2. As demonstrated, it can be used for subjects like this where our purpose is to gather information on something/someone, maybe find some new data correlations between one or more subjects or it can be used as an actual search engine, like to search Mems - no, not memes, Mems!
Oh! You don’t know what that is? Well, here you go:
Ta dah! Pretty cool right?
This brings us to the end of the post! I hope you’ve enjoyed this simple example and also that it encourages you to try Carrot2 for yourselves (Carrot2 Search), I’m sure you’ll like it as much as I do.
Until we meet again sometime & somewhere in the space-time continuum!
