I don’t mean for this to be an advertisement for Google, but I has been hearing about the Google Wonder Wheel for a few days now and decided I wanted to see what it is. Although still in the beta stage (I think), the Wonder Wheel is part of the search engine, showing semantic connections in a search query. In other words, you can see concepts branching off from the main query.

For example, I used Google to search for “Graphic Classroom” and the wheel expanded in any number of directions — showing me sites with lesson plans, books for reluctant readers and more. As I began to journey on the wheel, I found “adult graphic novels” and followed the thread to Neil Gaiman.

How do you get to the Wheel? This blog site gives a nice overview, but essentially, on the Google Search page, type in your keyword, and then one of the links at the top of the pages will be “show options” and then down on the left column, you can find “wonder wheel.”

Pretty nifty use of visual search technology.

Peace (in the wheel),
Kevin