Vivisimo Search Engine Clusty Offers More Targeted Search
Vivisimo this week unveiled Clusty.com, the first full-service search engine site powered completely by Vivismio’s breakthrough clustering technology. Instead of simply presenting long lists of results, Clusty.com groups search results into folder topics, giving users a quick overview of the main themes in the results and letting them focus on topics of interest. Designed to relieve consumers of information overload and provide easy access to information that is usually overlooked with current search engines, Clusty changes how consumers do general Web searches as well as shopping, blogs, gossip, images, Wikipedia and people searches.
ResearchBuzz’s Tara Calishain reports that Clusty offers several different categories of search; initial search categories include News, Web, Images, and Gossip (Gossip? No, not ‘blogs; news stuff like Rolling Stone.) A Customize! tab gives you the option to add eBay, Slashdot, or Blogs search tabs – why not just list all that stuff by default? You can also create your own search tabs (which didn’t work in Opera but worked okay in Mozilla); you’re given a list of available search engines and you can check which ones you want to include in your custom tab. Nice to see resources like Gigablast and Librarian’s Index to the Internet included here.
Built in response to the popularity of a demo search box on Vivisimo’s corporate Web site, Clusty takes search to a new level, with dedicated search tools for the most popular search activities and the first-ever customized search tab. Visitors can now undertake basic Web searches and see, in one glance, up to 250 search results organized around the main topics. For example, a search on “Walt Disney” brings back Clusty folders on Walt Disney World, Collectables, History, DVD, Biography, Walt Disney Pictures, and so on. Folders can be expanded with a click to view additional subtopics.
Vivisimo’s clustering technology changes the core search experience for everyone from students working on homework to corporate analysts tracking competitors to everyday consumers keeping up with news, politics, sports scores and movie listings or checking out travel destinations and shopping options. Clusty users benefit from a simple view of the Web that unlocks new information through faster, more effective searching.
Calishain adds “I did a Web search for roses. Sponsored results are at the top, while regular results are underneath. Clustered topics are on the left – in this case the topics included flowers, pictures, reviews, and antiques. In the case where the query is relevant (in this case it is) there’s also a list of shopping topics. Each search result has an option to group into a cluster, open the result in a new page, or preview the result in a window underneath the listing.
The news search has topic clusters at the top of the page, but it’s not clear that they’re related to your search results. (there are still a list of clustered topics on the left of the page.) Beneath the clustered news stories are ungrouped stories.”
The default Web search on Clusty includes several intuitive short-cuts for items like stock quotes, weather, dictionary and more. Besides basic Web searching, visitors can search dedicated tabs for shopping, news, blogs, images, Wikipedia and gossip. The final tab, “Customize!” lets users customize Clusty to suit their unique requirements. Visitors can choose the tabs to display from a list or create their own tabs by selecting information sources to search. Whether they want to track sports news, health related information or hobby sites, users can get fast and easy access to the information they care about, organized into clustered folders.
