Kalooga

Kalooga - Discover the web. This is simply a visual search engine. It's also an irritating search engine, because while it proudly says that it searches through 50 million photo galleries. What this means in practice is that it appears to group sets of photographs together. I ran a search for a particular ruined building and true, I got lots of results, but they were split into small groups, which simply meant more scrolling and looking.

I also wasn't impressed that it didn't cover resources such as Flickr either - at least from the searches that I ran. Can't see me becoming a big user of this one to be honest.

Comments

[Folkert Ringnalda]

Dear Phil,
Thanks for your time to investigate our discovery portal. Let me comment on some of your remarks;
*Group sets; we do not group sets of photographs together. If this is the case, it's done by the owner/creator of the collection. The SERP shows 5 results per page and 4 previews of a specific collection. In some cases it's possible that a specific result is displayed twice on the SERP. We're still working on it to avoid such results.
* Scrolling and Looking; we did a pilot with 'infinite scroll'. But this caused some technical problems. But we're still looking into it.
* Flickr; our index contains about 317.000 collections of Flickr (enter 'site:flickr.com'). Of course, Flickr has a huge index. But we don't want to be an 'Flickr aggregator'......there is more!!
* Usage; I'm sorry to hear that you're not becoming a big user and I hope you'll take time to visit us again and hopefully you'll see we've made progress.
* Focus; Kalooga is an European focussed media company and our main objective is to distribute visual search content to online (premium) publishers. We're also focussing on specific content; sports, travel, entertainment (celebrities, movies) and automotive. More categories, more countries are foreseen, but we can't have it al at once. We're learning and building. Thanks for this opportunity!