Tags: Microsoft

Clusty from Vivisimo impresses with Clustered Searches

No doubt, Google and Yahoo! are great search engines. Google is great in speed and straightforward search results, while Yahoo! excels in integration of services. Both are thriving to outdo each other in the search engine market by offering more and more services. And there is little market left for other search engines. Microsoft is struggling to find a foot with their revamped and re-launched MSN Search.

What is common in all these major search engines is that they provide linear searching capabilities. We put in a keyword in the search box and press enter. And the engine results in hundreds of pages of results with links and snippets. The result being, user either gets lost in the massive number of search pages, or just limits his research to the top 10-20 links. Large amounts of information just remain out of his reach unless better keyword combination is used for searching.

To save users from this entire linear searching dilemma, cluster based search engines come handy. I have been using Kartoo since quite sometime. Now Vivisimo arrives into the market with Clusty. Vivisimo reports Clusty to be the first full-service search site powered completely by breakthrough clustering technology. Instead of providing us with just a long list of search results, user gets to see a list of categories on the left side, which contains relevant search results for that particular keyword. The categories are further divided into subcategories. In the end, user gets to reach a more specific search result, making finding the information he is looking for easier.

Clusty uses many sources for its search results. It ranges from MSN, Wisenut, Lycos and Gigablast for normal web searches to Reuters, AFP, AP and more for news. It uses BizRate for shopping site and the very popular Wikipedia for encyclopedia searches. Other than this Clusty also has search sections for Image hunting and Gossips. Overall, a vast variety of search sources for viewers to get results from. Users can even turn on searches for Blogs, eBay and Slashdot from its advanced options. And what is even more exciting is that fact that it allows users to create custom tabs to search a particular set of search engines. Thus, certain search engines can be omitted from the search results if so desired. No other meta-crawler apparently offers such flexibility.

What is interesting is the fact that both Google and Yahoo! are missing from the search sources. Maybe it is an indication on what user base Vivisimo is aiming for. And considering Google is having a ball of time with the success it has had with their search engine, it is good that some competition is coming up. We all know what happened to the development of Internet Explorer with little competition left in the market!

So, what is normal user opinion about this search engine? I asked three of my non-technical friends to try it out and give me their quick overview. The most common complaint was the color combination of the homepage! With dark blue colors and slow loading images, it does not impress much. The site’s access time is also slow at this moment, which can be blamed on the amount of media attention this nifty search engine is getting. But they all liked the way it separated the information into categories. And of course, the flexibility is also impressive. The search results also let the user have a preview of the result page on the search page itself! This factor also impressed the users. Netscape search engine, which uses Google technology for its results offer similar functionality. Overall, they liked it for the features but still preferred Google to it because of the speeds and simplicity.

To tackle competition from other search engines offering search toolbars, Clusty comes with its own toolset. Internet Explorer users visiting the search engine get an option to install a toolbar for IE, while Mozilla and Firefox users get an option to add Clusty to the search box present in the browser! Very thoughtful of the developers. The toolbar for Internet Explorer as usual has its own popup blocker and comes with the regular routine options for highlighting keywords and all.

Overall, a nice search utility to give a try when Google just is not responding with good results to your keywords! Who knows, it might leave you impressed! I myself was specifically impressed with the combo searching Blogs from the engines of Feedster, Technorati and Blogdigger!

Check out: Vivisimo | Clusty | Press Release

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