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Searching the Web in 3-D

A company called SpaceTime shows off a pretty but impractical graphical search interface.

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A company called SpaceTime has just released a program that it says “revolutionizes” searching the Web. This is kind of true, if by “revolutionize” they mean turning it into a hopelessly useless video game.

SpaceTime is a hungry little app — it eats up system resources — that lets you watch the Web in three dimensions (for all those people who lament, “The Web, man, why’s it got to be 2-D?”) Type in a Google or eBay keyword and SpaceTime puts each result in a separate window arranged in a 3-D graphical cascade; you flip through them by moving forward and back through space. The effect is a little cool for maybe a few minutes, but soon you’re yearning to be back in Firefox.

Try SpaceTime for yourself.

By Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.

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