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5 Ways You Can Search The Web Using Tag Clouds

Saikat Basu — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:01:47 +0000

Quite a few blogs and websites have them. Tag clouds are one of the simplest visualization tools available that can enhance access to buried articles on your website. It is quite simple to do really, as it is just a visual – seemingly haphazard – display of the tags on a website. It’s just that the importance of each is shown by size and/or color.

Tag clouds became a default of many blogs and were as common as fleas on a dog’s back, till their relative importance declined somewhat. But tag clouds still offer a different way to search because it is so visual and quick. The eye prefers to pan and scan rather than go vertically or horizontally in search of information. So, some web services have continued to take the help of tag clouds. Here are six web services that help you look for content using tag clouds.

Quintura

The search engine touts the advantages of ‘visual find’. The search engine with a tag cloud feature does work for me because along with the linear list of results it gives me a tag loud of related keywords. A mouse-over the related keywords gives me a preview of the search results I can expect if I do a search with that. Quintura’s tag based search works because if you are searching for something without a definite idea, the related keywords help out to broaden your options. Quintura also gives you a free web search client. The 4.4 MB free search software helps you to search the web using a selected search engine. We have mentioned Quintura before when we talked about The Top 5 Google Alternatives and Why You Should Use Them.

Search Cloudlet (Firefox)

The search add-on for Firefox inserts smart tag clouds into Google, Yahoo, and Twitter interface to help you search faster. Search Cloudlet seamlessly inserts a tag cloud as you conduct your usual search. As you can see in the screenshot, it helps you to scan and read the tags instead of drilling down through the list of search results. You can also remove keywords highlighting it in red with a mouse-over and clicking on the word. Search Cloudlet however did not work for me on Twitter search as intended. The add-on is not perfect, but it’s still worth keeping for what the tag cloud enabler gives you.

If you want to catch what’s trending on Twitter with the help of a tag cloud, try Twitscoop instead.

Deeperweb.com

Deeperweb again helps you improve your Google search results with a tag cloud. It also comes with a Firefox add-on. Deeperweb allows you to again extend your search by giving you relevant keywords in the tag cloud. You can fine tune the search by removing none-essential keywords. Get the complete Deeperweb experience as it has lots more to offer beyond the standard Google search.

SenseBot

Sensebot is not pretty to look at but it does bring out relevant key phrases from the search results as it summarizes search results for you. The semantic search engine also summarizes news searches. You can customize the summary by choosing to leave out few of the links. Sensebot gives you the choice of using Google, Yahoo, and Bing along with its own semantic search engine to conduct the search.

YouTube Cloud

Searching through thousands of videos is a mean feat. YouTube does have a good search but the third-party YouTube tag cloud gives you something more to work with. You can quickly filter YouTube videos to catch the most viewed, most trending, or the most popular ones. You can also use the dropdowns to select videos using a time frame, categories, and country. The tag cloud then makes it a cinch as you just have to select the bigger words to get to the best YouTube video among the rest (any surprises that it’s a video for an iPhone 5 preview). You can also personalize YouTube Cloud to display the tag cloud your way.

Tag clouds won’t always give you the right result you are looking for. But compared to the list like display of search results, it gives you a more sweeping picture of what’s available. It highlight’s the important and combined with a traditional approach to search might help you to get rid of the fluff on the search page.

We have featured many search engines and the ways they use to search the web. Have you tried the tag approach? Do you think it gives you a better glimpse into your searches?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

2 Ways To Easily Navigate Through (Long) Articles In FireFox

Ann Smarty — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 01:30:43 +0000

The Internet and the search engines made it so easy to find plenty of information about anyone or anything. In fact we can now find and go through so much content that we barely have time to read. We rather scan through the articles to get the main idea or to get to the place which is really important to us.

Today’s post will make the task of “scanning” webpage content easier, smarter and more efficient: both the addons listed here create a short outline of the current page and let you quickly jump to the part of the page that seems to be most relevant.

Navigate the Page Using Subheadings

HeadingsMap is a handy FireFox addon that generates the page map based on its headings and subheadings.

Headings and subheadings are the elements of the page marked-up using

–

tags. Website content creators use the tags to structure the page based on topics and subtopics. Here’s an easy way to describe what page headings are about:

Back in school when you were taught how to write papers, you had your main idea with the main heading (H1) and then supporting facts with subheadings (H2) and often those supporting facts had their own supporting facts (H3).

Website content creators are guided by the same principle when creating a web page content – therefore extracting those subheadings is a great way to generate the outline of the current article. The HeadingsMap addon makes this outline and it also makes it clickable.

The heading map is triggered in the sidebar once you click the icon in the status bar:

Here’s the heading map of one of the recent MUO articles, for example:

Notice that the addon highlights the places where the structure is somewhat broken: in our case, that’s h4 tag coming above h3 tag.

Notice also that it brings you to the subheading on the page and highlights it in yellow once you click it in the heading map.

Note: website owners are not always really consistent when it comes to using the h1-h6 tags, so the outline won’t always be correct (but it will still represent the contests of the page):

Some subheadings get omitted and missed;

Some elements of the page are marked-up with h1-h3 tags for “search engines” (as these are believed to be good places to put your keywords).

Navigate the Page Using the Tag Cloud

While the above addon relies on website owners and how they use the heading tags, this tool uses its own built-in algorithm to do the text analysis of any page and to generate a tag cloud representing its most frequent words and pages.

Once you have the addon installed, use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+U to generate a tag cloud for the current web page (Note: the same shortcut generates the tag cloud for a part of the page as well: just select the area you want the tag cloud for and use the shortcut – this is very handy when you, for example, want to omit readers’ comments, navigation, etc).

Here’s a tag cloud for the exact same MUO article:

Now just click any tag that you want more context for and you’ll be taken to its first occurrence on the web page; click again and you’ll be taken to its next occurrence (the type of behavior you have with the addons that allow to highlight Google search terms on the target page):

Are there any other addons that offer some alternative and interesting ways to navigate the current page? Please share them in the comments!

3 Web-Based Tools that Generate Awesome Tag Clouds

Ann Smarty — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:30:34 +0000

Building a beautiful tag cloud (based on the terms extracted from a web page) is not all about fun.

This post is meant not only to show you the tools that will build an awesome tag cloud for you but also to inspire you and share various creative ways to use those tools.

For example, you can create infographics to visualize your point and make your message easier to deliver. Besides, you should also check this post on how tag clouds may be useful.

1. Tagul: Create and Embed Interactive Tag Clouds

Tagul (view previous MUO review of Tagul) is a multi-feature tag cloud generator that requires registration and allows you to build beautiful clouds and embed them on your blogs.

Build and customize your awesome tag cloud

Core Options:

Name your cloud;
Copy and paste the source code (or let the tool grab the source code from the URL) and fetch the tags;
Choose the shape (cloud, heart, star, triangle, pentagram, circle, rectangle) and specify the form angle and aspect ratio;
Select the font

View the generated tags in a separate tab; you can delete any of them if you wish:

The result

After you build your tag cloud and are fully satisfied with what you see in the preview, save all the changes in the “Preview” tab and embed the tag cloud to your page.

You can view my tag cloud live here (Feel free to hover over any tag to see it dance):

2. Wordle: Beautiful Tag Clouds as Downloadable Images

Wordle (see previous MUO review of Wordle) is another great tool for creating beautiful tag clouds. Here are some awesome ideas on how you can use the tool creatively:

Build and customize your tag cloud

The tool very fast and allows to set quite a few options:

Set the language preferences and filters;
Select the font;
Set the layout and color palette:

Very similar tool: ABC Ya (actually, this one has almost the same functionality). Another more simplistic but still fun one: Word Mozaic – it allows to choose among the huge number of forms and symbols and creates very appealing tag clouds as downloadable .gif images:

3. Tagxedo: Build Awesome Infographics

Tagxedo (see our previous review of TagXedo here) is the most powerful tools in terms of the look and feel of your tag cloud. It builds typography artworks. If you ever run out of ideas on how to use the tool, be sure to check out these 101 ways to have fun with it.

As with the above tools, this one lets you upload the text or generate it from the URL. However, Tagxedo has more powerful filtering options where you can:

Exclude numbers and common words;
Combine related and identical words;
Modify the list by frequency:

Besides that, the tool offers a huge variety of fonts, themes, color palettes, etc. Its most powerful feature is the great range of cloud shapes to choose from:

The result can be embedded (using the iFrame) or saved in the gallery (with the link to the live tag cloud). Mine is here by the way.

Can you think of other ways these fun web applications could come in really handy? Please share them in the comments!

How To Add A Cool 3D Tag Cloud To Your WordPress Blog

Jeffry Thurana — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:02 +0000

The vast amount of cool customizations maybe one of the reasons why people choose to go through hoops installing their own self-hosted wordpress blogs instead of using other free blog services. And one of those cool things is the wordpress tag cloud plugin.

For those who are unfamiliar with tag cloud, it is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus, both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible.

This is what a wordpress tag cloud plugin looks like:

I never really put much attention to tag cloud, but one recent discovery altered the path of my focus a little bit.

It’s (not) gonna rain

What I discovered was a tag cloud with a twist – literally. What made it different from ordinary tag clouds was the way the content of the cloud twisted around in 3D. I personally thought that it was cool and it added the visual richness of the blog. Translation: I wanted it.

Problem was, I didn’t know what it is called and whether or not it will work with WordPress. After some searching and asking around, I finally could exhale a sigh of relief because I found the wordpress tag cloud plugin to produce that kind of effect. The plugin is called WP Cumulus.

With a clear target to pursue, I went directly to the installation process.

Note: This plugin is Flash-based. So, there might be several factors (type of browser, browser plugin, internet connection, etc.) that might cause it not to display properly.

Installing WordPress Plugins

I picked the easiest way to install the plugin. I logged in to my WordPress dashboard and continued to the sidebar. I chose the “Plugins” link and “Add New“.

I did the plugin search, and…

Clicked the “Install Now” button.

After the installation, I chose to activate it directly. But if you want to activate/deactivate it, you can do so from the Plugins page.

Controlling the Cloud

One of the ways to tweak the display options of the wordpress tag cloud plugin is by going to the Tools > Settings > WP Cumulus menu from the sidebar.

There are many tweakable elements including the size of the WP Cumulus box, the font and background color and the rotation speed.

You can show WP Cumulus as part of your blog theme, use it as a widget, or insert it into post and/or pages using simple codes. Look at the plugin’s “Installation” page at WordPress.org for more detailed instruction.

If you want to use it as a widget, you have to make sure that your blog’s theme supports widgets. If it does, go to the Appearance > Widget menu.

You will find the WP-Cumulus item in the widget list. All you have to do is drag it to the widget bar.

WP-Cumulus as a widget also provides its users with settings pane.

Don’t forget to click “Save” after adjusting the settings.

The color of the cloud

You will notice that all the colors used are written in hexadecimal HTML color codes. One trick that you can use to find out which code belongs to which color is to search for it via any application through the options to change the color of its element.

For example, you can use any word processor and begin the steps to change the font color. Then you can use the color palette to search for the color code. For those who work with graphics and images, you can utilize your graphic applications.

Or you could search the web with the search string: “web color code” or “hexadecimal color code” (or something similar).

Life beyond the cloud

Because the WP Cumulus plugin produces moving images, it’s a bit difficult to show it here. To see how this twisting tag cloud looks on a real site, there’s no better place to visit than the plugin creator’s page. The site is also a good place to start finding similar plugins for other blogging platforms.

There are other interesting variations of tag cloud plugins for WordPress. To find out more, you could search for “moving tag cloud” (or other similar search strings) in the Plugins section of WordPress.org.

Do you use tags to enhance your WordPress blog visually? Do you know other cool tag cloud WordPress plugins? Share using the comment below.

Image credit: kevindooley

5 Unique Websites with Very Useful Tag Clouds

Tina Sieber — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:44:15 +0000

Generally, tag or word clouds visually depict the words used in a given text. Frequently used words may stick out with an increased font size, groups of tags may appear in uniform colors. Additionally, tag clouds can visualize relationships of words.

Tag clouds are much easier to grasp than simple lists, as words can be weighted with the help of font size and color.

We see tag clouds on lots of sites these days. Almost in all cases the purpose of the tag cloud is to give user an easier way to browse the site and at the same time see popular content.

Here are some of my favorite ways tag clouds are used on the web.

1. Discover New Music

The Music Artist Cloud is an artist recommendation engine. Try to “Get Artist Cloud” for a band you like and receive a cloud of similar musicians you might enjoy. I love many of the suggested bands and there are yet a few to be explored.

The site also fetches music videos from YouTube which you can watch while noting down discoveries.

2. Extract Information from Twitter

Using Tweet Cloud you can create a tag cloud based on a keyword or Twitter ID. This tag cloud shows you the major words found in the most recent tweets and their occurrence frequency in relation to each other. The cloud rotates in 3D and you can click words to explore them further.

3. Create Fancy Word Art

Wordle was built for no other purpose than to play with it and create pretty word clouds. You provide the text and can tweak fonts, layouts and color schemes. Results can be printed, downloaded and saved to the Wordle gallery. Below are some recent examples.

4. Improve Google Search

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension. The next time you search Google, Yahoo or Twitter after installing this tool you will find a tag cloud on top of the search results. This tag cloud derived from search results and shows you all the keywords relevant to your search results.

Users can easily narrow/filter search by clicking keywords on the cloud and adding them to the query. This is a must-have addon for everyone who frequently searches on Google, Yahoo or Twitter.

Where and how Search Cloudlet appears can be optimized within the extension’s option.

5. Analyze Your Texts

Are there words that you use far too often?

Using a tool like TagCrowd you can create a tag cloud from any text and analyze whether or not your use of words is balanced. You can enter a webpage URL, upload a text document or paste a piece of text and finally finetune the options. When done preparing click Visualize! and wait for the result.

Below is an excerpt from Obama’s inauguration speech.

Where do you find tag clouds helpful?

Image credits: modish

TaggedFrog – Cool File Tagging App for Windows

T.J. Mininday — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:01:03 +0000

The adoption of tags on the internet has almost become a prerequisite on any blog, website or social networking site. The ability to simply add a keyword to anything allows for much better organization and easier searching when something needs to be referenced in the future.

Most often they are used on blogs but they are also used in various ways on social networking sites such as Delicious, news sites like Newsvine or even online stores like Amazon. Any site that generates regular or changing content will usually have some sort of tag system in place. So why just the web? Why can’t we have it on our PCs as well?

TaggedFrog is a simple and free file tagging app for Windows XP or Vista that allows for the easy addition of files to be tagged with as many descriptive keywords (tags) as you can possibly think of. You can then visualize them in a cloud display which looks very similar to your everyday cloud display you see on many websites today.

You first begin tagging the files by adding and managing the keywords you’d like to create for your files.

An easy drag and drop interface allows for the easy addition of any type of file, document or web link from your computer. Once they are added, you can simply add any of your created tags to that file.

So now, instead of renaming and changing files as they are created, you can quickly and easily add tags to them. This allows for easy filtering and searching of your hundreds of thousands of files.

Along with the tag cloud, you can also set up “favorites” for locating some of the more popular files and tags. If you’d prefer not to go through and tag all of your files manually, you can also set up options to go through your entire hard drive with the nice “Auto Scan and Tag” feature.

The simple and clean interface, and fast search capability of tags, makes TaggedFrog a great alternative to the Windows Vista launch bar, and MUCH better search alternative than on Windows XP. Adding tags in Vista can be very tedious and having a separate application to keep them organized can become very handy when files begin to pile up on your PC.

There are plenty of other search alternatives (Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, etc…) than a tagging application like this. But if you simply want better organization of files, instead of creating hundreds of directories, and you don’t want to bog down your computer with search indexing, then TaggedFrog is likely the right application for you.

What do you think of tagging files instead of simply searching? Are there any other file tagging applications for Windows that you use?

How To Create and Add A Tag Cloud To Blogger Blog

Wendy Limauge — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:01:44 +0000

A tag cloud is a way to show your blog viewers the topics your posts fall under and the frequency in which those topics appear. WordPress makes it easy for their users to show a tag cloud with a plug-in but Blogger users don’t have that option – until now.

Zoom Clouds offers a simple way to include a tag cloud on your Blogger blog. The process only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

3 Steps to Add a Tag Cloud to Blog

Create a account at Zoomclouds
Design your cloud.
Add the HTML code to your site as a widget.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Once you have verified your account you are ready to create your tag cloud. Fill out the form with:

your tag cloud name (no spaces in the name)
a short description
your RSS feed URL
how many days you would like to include

When you have filled out the form click Create Cloud!

On the next page click Go update my cloud! so the system can grab information from your RSS feed to generate keywords for your tag cloud. When the system is complete click set the look of your cloud. . . to customize the look of it.

Click Design at the top right to change the size, font, border, pixel width, and link colors.

Click Filters to add keywords to the list that you do not want the tag cloud to show. You can also add words you definitely want the tag cloud to show all of the time.

When you have the tag cloud the way you want it, go back to Design and copy the HTML code to use on your Blogger blog as a widget.

Here is an example of a Zoom tag cloud I made for my site. Try it and you will see that it is very easy to create a tag cloud for Blogger using ZoomClouds.