Searching the Friendly (Visual) Clouds

There's a slew of them. Little bubbles of thoughts and words strung together through their associations, interactions, and connections to one another. They're the newest form of visual display for search engines: Quintura, Visuwords, TouchGraph, and KartOO (to name only a few). What are they? A quick breakdown is as follows:

• TouchGraph: Oh, this is cool. Using Java and the Google APIs, you can create a visual display map to show the connections between related websites. As they define it, "The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites." Check it out and see who and what ties into the things you looked into.
• Visuwords: A graphical online dictionary. It isn't anything new (I'd seen several of these types applied to thesauri over the years, namely the Visual Thesaurus), but this one happens to be pretty robust dictionary with the addition of color-coding and related usage, it's a lot of fun AND educational.
• Quintura: A visual search engine, still in Beta. It starts with your key words, and offers associated terms you may append or replace your existing search with. You may also save the search bubbles, keeping it for yourself or for sharing with another. There's also a kid-friendly version of the software at http://kids.quintura.com/
• KartOO: A bit like TouchGraph, KartOO let's you search for keyword(s) and returns your data as visual associations to others. As they define it, "KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm."