Searching for books- Google Wonder Wheel

Many thanks to Jackie at Farm Lane Books for her post about Google Wonder Wheel.

Graphic presentations of search results are not new, but sometimes they can lead you down new paths just because of the way the search results are presented. I blogged earlier this year about finding new authors through Literature maps. I blogged also about the graphic search engine that Encompass provides.

Google Wonder Wheel is really a variant of that style of searching..

To find Google wonder wheel go to www.google.com, type in the topic you’d like to search for and then click on Show Options.

In the left hand column you will find the Wonder Wheel option.

Above is the wonder wheel I obtained when I searched for ‘crime fiction Australia’.

I clicked on the phryne fisher link and got the wheel on the left. What makes it impressive, is that it actually gives you books to look for.

What is really impressive is that you can then click on one of the links in the wheel and get to the next level in the search.

On the right hand side of the page Google is constantly generating a list of web page links. Very impressive.

The image below is a bit fuzzy, but if you click on it you'll see it in bigger size. The circle at the bottom is where I started, then you can see the phryne fisher search, and then I clicked on the castlemaine murders.

The search is not without drawbacks, and as I tested it, it threw up irrelevant items, but that is where the user's critical judgement comes in.

Try your favourite author or genre, and let me know how you go.

Other tags in this blog:

Encompass - finding new authors

Another interesting tool for finding new authors is the Encompass Wheel at the British Council website. Here is what you see at the start

You click on the category that you want, e.g. Books for Adults

And of course then I am going to choose Crime

This is where the experience becomes a bit disappointing. At this stage you choose one or more categories and then the system generates a list. I found the lists were not very extensive, but unlike what we saw yesterday in the literature map, the list is printable, and it has information about specific books.

However, it does link off to an allied British Council Contemporary Writers site where you can search a large database. However once again the lists here are a bit eclectic with huge omissions and some strange inclusions.

Literature Maps - finding new authors

Literature Map, is a digital ‘tourist map’ of authors based on a self-adapting artificial intelligence engine that learns from the behaviour and preferences of users of the system. Type in an author name and it will display a map of other author names, spaced relative to your original selection. The closer two names are (graphically) the higher the likelihood that you’ll enjoy reading both authors.

I played around with it a bit, but it is not very good on fledgling Australian authors like Katherine howell, P.D. Martin, and Leah Giarratano..
However I did get some reasonable results for Peter Temple, Michael Robotham, Arthur Upfield, and Agatha Christie (not that I'm claiming her as Australian)

Here is the centre of the map that resulted for Michael Robotham.

The map is saying that if you like Michael Robotham then these other writers are possible likes too.
So I clicked on Mark Billingham (I know they are great friends) and then a new map generated, with this at the centre.

Click on John Harvey and another range of authors appears.

You get the idea. Unfortunately there is no tool to print out a list of the authors for you, which would be a good tool, and no connection to anything to give you a list of books, but then you can't have everything.