The Google Wonder Wheel
Yesterday, our CEO sent me an article from Lifehacker that announced a new Google experiment, the Google Wonder Wheel. The experiment didn’t actually work on my desktop but the video on YouTube demonstrated the capabilities. It’s just like a mind map that allows you to drill down into deeper search results. The future is getting cooler, right?
Using the wonder wheel made me wonder about MindManager. I realized that we can already do this type of visual searching inside MindManager 8 already. Let me show you how it’s done.
Use Google Search Results Inside of MindManager
While the Google Wheel simply lets you search visually, MindManager lets you use your search results in your work! Here are a few ways that you could leverage this feature today:
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Build a better business plan
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Update your strategy for our tough economic climate
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Track your competition
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Research for a report
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Prepare a presentation
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And more…
Here’s a look at how fast and easy you could start using search results in your map. Start with any map that you’re working on.
Select the topic that you want to search and then use the Google Search map part to perform your search. You can also specify how many results you would like to appear within the map.
MindManager performs the Google Search and returns the results in your map.
Next to each of the results is a summary text note which describes the web page and a hyperlink to the web page. When you click on any of the hyperlinks, you can open up the page inside of MindManager where you can simply cut and paste relevant content into the map that you are working on.
Once you have the search results in your map, there are all sorts of ways that you can leverage them. Here are a few ideas:
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Drag, drop and reorganize the results into your map
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Copy and paste content from within the pages into your map
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Update the text notes with your own comments
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Use icons and tags to categorize the results
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Filter the results to display subsets based on your criteria
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Transform the links into tasks, assigning resources, due dates and % complete
What do you think about the Google Wonder Wheel and mapping out your search results?
About the Author: Michael Deutch is Mindjet’s Chief Evangelist, content contributor for the Mindjet Blog and the Mindjet Connections newsletter. Get more from Michael on Twitter.
[...] recent introduction of the Wonder Wheel made me wonder what other options are available. Of course, you can perform visual searches with [...]
Thanks Richard. The map part was a new feature added in MindManager 8.
Nice article!
Is the Google Search map part available for MM v7 Pro?
Thanks,
R
Thanks Colin & Susan. James, thanks for reminding me of that search engine. I’m added a reminder for me to investigate the search engine space again for other interesting visualizations. There were a few others out there too. Time to see if they’ve improved.
nice article! thanks!
Michael,
After looking at the Google Wonder wheel it reminded me of a search engine that’s been around for years. I thought you might find it interesting. You can find it at http://ww3.kartoo.com.
James Noble
This is brilliant.
Google’s Wonder Wheel is neat, but I was much more fascinated with the MindManager map parts. I’ve been using MM for several years now, but have always ignored the map parts. I immediately see the usefulness and certainly will be using it in my future maps.
Thanks for the post.