A new search engine is completely changing the way we use the Internet

“Metadrift was born out of a desire to reclaim serendipity in our lives,” says Royal College of Art student Wai-Chuen Cheung explaining his latest project. “It is a tool for people to explore the Internet, and to stumble across content they would never even think to search for.”

Metadrift began with Cheung’s dissatisfaction with traditional search engines - you search for something and a search engine tells you where it is. It may be functional but it's rarely inspiring. Cheung wanted to create a programme that would inject spontaneity and offer users an opportunity to uncover unexpected information.

In essence it's a search engine that uses 3D visualisation to allow users to ‘get lost’ within a landscape of information. Currently TED Talks is being used as its dataset, Cheung has organised all two thousand talks into a spatial layout by theme, forming them into conceptual clusters. Essentially this lets users virtually walk around the various TED talks and stumble upon ones that they may not have known about.  

"I believe that our relationship with the Internet is becoming too passive. The act of "browsing" or "searching" the Internet is becoming a linear, one-way process where we consume the information that is shown to us without putting effort into finding it," explains Cheung. "Contrast this to the way we peruse a book store or explore a library – Metadrift seeks to bring back this browsing experience."