WebProNews » Clusty

Vivisimo Taps Remix Clustering For Search

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:58:35 +0000

A new patent pending technology for the firm behind Clusty.com introduces what they are calling “Clustering 2.0″ to search results.

There’s an old accounting joke where an executive asks “What’s 2+2?” and the accountant answers with “What would you like it to be?”

Vivisimo announced a technology that may give people the answers they want, if the first search doesn’t present them on an obscure topic. Through their remix clustering, company CEO Raul Valdes-Perez said it works to show people more topics without overloading them with a lengthy list:

With a single click, remix clustering answers the question: What other, subtler topics are there? It works by clustering again the same search results, but with an added input: ignore the topics that the user just saw. Typically, the user will then see new major topics that didn

Clusty Remixes Search

Janet Meiners — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:57:07 +0000

Search engine Clutsy has a new clustering technology to help you find more information related to your search.

They already have a folder of subtopics relating to your search topics. Now there is a small link near the folders with related topics that says, “remix.” Click it and you’ll see more related searches or clusters.

It’s like the shuffle feature on your CDs. The patent-pending “remix clustering” works dynamically to exclude search results you’ve already seen. In other words, it shows you new clusters.

The company Vivisimo recently won InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year award for the best Enterprise Search solution with their Velocity 6.0 search product. This is their third year winning the award.

Remix clustering functionality is built into Velocity 6.0.

On a side note, I like Clutsy’s job search that’s built right into their search engine. Type in your city and click the jobs tab and you’ll see jobs located there – it’s powered by Indeed. That means it aggregates many different job sites. You can do the same with images, blog posts, and other kinds of searches without having to retype your query.

Comments

Clusty Mobile Is Made Available

Doug Caverly — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:18:09 +0000

I’m always suspicious when a company claims to have made its product or service available for mobiles. Is the new version different than the regular offering? And is it something I’d even want to access from my cell phone? In regards to Clusty Mobile, a search site, the answer to that first question is “yes.”

The answer to the second question is “no,” but that could just be me – as I’ve said before, I tend to use my cell phone as a paperweight instead of a communication device, and I almost never explore anything other than those two options. That’s not Clusty Mobile’s fault.

Clusty Mobile is a moderately thorough reworking of Clusty.com. “Nobody wants to wade through thousands of links to access Web information via their mobile devices,” admits Raul Valdes-Perez, the CEO of Vivisimo (which runs Clusty), in a statement. “We’ve combined the reliability of Clusty’s search capabilities with navigation appropriate for mobile users and given them the ability to find exactly what they’re looking for right at their fingertips.”

Judge for yourself. Clusty.com search results for the term “dog” begin with a stock quote, then move on to Wikipedia, the Dog Breed Information Center, and the Association of Pet Dog Trainers. Clusty Mobile turns up the same stock quote, and then gives a one-sentence review of the movie “Firehouse Dog,” which is apparently “ruined with endless fart and poop jokes, and an overlong run time.”

To be fair, however, “dog” might not be a common search term for mobile users. And Clusty Mobile offers up alternative phrases that Clusty.com does not (“dog breeds,” “dog show,” etc.) in an effort save users from those annoying small keypads.

Clusty Mobile doesn’t make me want to yank out my phone and start searching away, but for those of you who already do this sort of thing, it may be worth a look.

FirstGov Launches New Search Engine

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:47:34 +0000

Vivisimo and Microsoft combined technologies to power the FirstGov.gov search engine, which launched three months ahead of schedule.

FirstGov.gov? Sounds like the Department of Redundancy Department named the site. Putting the jokes aside, Vivisimo and its contractor-partner, Microsoft, managed to integrate their respective search tools into a single search point of presence for the FirstGov website, GCN reported.

Vivisimo brought its clustering know-how to the table, while Microsoft contributed search expertise. Together, they have rebuilt FirstGov’s search engine into a site that indexes 40 million pages now compared to 8 million in its previous iteration.

Users of Vivisimo’s Clusty search site will recognize the familiar clustered results on the left side of the search result page. A quick test query for “fine arts grants” brought back 119 results, sorted into a list of sites like the federal NEA, state results from Virginia and Ohio, and even some results from the official site of the Chickasaw Nation.

GCN commented in its report about some of the features available on FirstGov:

…visitors also will receive improved search results, including links to Portable Document Format forms, podcasts of President Bush’s speeches or comments on specific topics, and links to frequently asked questions that are ranked by user needs.

Vivisimo also includes a new feature that lets users preview the Web page link before actually leaving FirstGov.gov. The preview box appears in the list of result links, which lets the user decide how worthwhile the responses are.

GSA also plans on rolling out a government news and images search and refreshing the look of the site in the fall…

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Clusty Has No Lust For Personalization

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:10:15 +0000

Providing personalized search has become a big focus for sites like Yahoo and Google, but the CEO of Clusty.com’s parent company Vivisimo thinks search personalization is a dead end.

“Search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists,” wrote Raul Valdes-Perez in a whitepaper pointed out by John Battelle. Valdes-Perez lists five reasons why the quest for more users of personalized search, one that has Google and Yahoo promoting search personalization heavily, is a waste of time. We’ll summarize those reason here:

1) People’s interests change frequently.
2) Search engines use weak data to personalize search.
3) Using data from the whole page visited from a search may be misleading because people visit sites based on a title and a short snippet of text in the search engine result.
4) In households, frequently shared computers among family members could skew results.
5) Short queries don’t give the search engines enough to determine one’s interests.

Point number three could be the strongest point Valdes-Perez makes, due to the proliferation of spam blogs and scraper sites in search engine results. Someone clicking on one based on its entry in a search result page and finding it’s a useless site will exit it quickly. Will personalization take those quick visits into account?

The argument for point one, where interests change, makes sense from a short-term perspective. “Seasonal phenomena like elections, the Olympics, sports leagues, etc. also lead to variable interests: I’ll follow the Olympics for the next month or so, but will pay no attention for another four years,” Valdes-Perez wrote.

But the ongoing use of personalization over a long-term should build a more accurate search experience. That of course depends on the skill of the engineers who create that experience.

Points two and five are essentially the same. Short one or two word queries make for weak data. Again, that could be mitigated over long-term use. The fourth point doesn’t apply to personalization schemes like Google’s Personalized Home or Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 because both of them require a user to login. Users might forget to logout from time to time, though, but probably not enough to mess up the results.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Clusty Out Of Beta

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:15:48 +0000

Vivisimo’s clustering search engine has left beta after a year of testing and feedback from users.

The marketing people at Vivisimo must be pleased with their choice of a name for their consumer search engine. In a statement released to mark the first anniversary of the Clusty product, the company displays a sense of humor associated with the simplistic but memorable name:

On September 30, 2004, Vivisimo launched the “Clusty” brand and received some interesting reactions, including:

– The Clusty name brings to mind “Krusty the Clown” from the FOX animated sitcom, “The Simpsons.”

– The name sounds slightly lewd and reminds people of words like “lusty” and “busty.”

– The name reminds slightly older moviegoers of “Crusty the Crab,” a character from the 1964 movie “Incredible Mr. Limpet.”

– Requests that the company fire both its domain name research team and its product manager. Both remain employed with the company.

– Slightly gentler feedback that Clusty’s full name, “Clusty the Clustering Engine,” sounds like the title of a children’s book.

“Despite its name, or because of it, a growing number of savvy and novice search users are giving Clusty the Crown,” said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and co-founder of Vivisimo.

A clustering search engine like Clusty performs metasearches, conducted over a number of search engines like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, and others. In returning results, Clusty attempts to cluster them by topics. Users can also group the results by sources or URLs.

Clusty does web searches, and via selection of tabs at the top of its page, users can sift through other types of online data: news, images, shopping, Wikipedia, blogs, and jobs. A last tab, Customize, lets users display other available tabs, like eBay or Gossip, or create new ones.

The blog search tab sends searches to Blogdigger, Blogpulse, DayPop, Feedster, and Technorati, and clusters results. That search is limited by the speed of the receiving search engines at those five sites, but does cluster them nicely once returned.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Making A Case For Metasearch

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:37:54 +0000

Search engines have caused users to become dependent on their functions, even to the point of becoming “fans” of one or another; that does users a disservice.

Metasearch Presents Alternatives To Standard Search

Editor’s Note: Will a metasearch site ever gain the prominence of a Google or Yahoo? How will that affect SEO marketing efforts? Search your feelings and post them at WebProWorld.

The Wall Street Journal’s article on SEO firm Traffic Power, and the problems experienced by some of its customers, makes for very interesting reading. While the focus of the article discusses the company’s founder, its practices, and the experiences of some of its customers, David Kesmodel’s report makes a different point very apparent in my opinion.

Search engine branding has taken hold, and that branding has caused businesses to need to pursue optimization strategies. The best resource for a particular product or service may not be the one that gets a high placement on the first search result page in Google or Yahoo, for example. It might not even get on the first page.

That branding may be hurting users instead of helping them. If a legitimate business uses a SEO firm that employs the kind of tactics that get sites banned from indexes, the business feels the impact online. A customer who could benefit from a particular online business, and doesn’t find it due to banning, is as much a victim here.

All the big names want to keep users in place. Specifically, their place, their top-level domain, their advertising. Monopolies tend not to benefit their users over a long period of time. Users would benefit from using sites like Clusty or DogPile to find a broader assortment of results.

Vivisimo, creator of clustering engine Clusty, did a whitepaper about metasearch. While they certainly have an interest in promoting the metasearch approach, Vivisimo makes a good argument for the “many headed” approach to search:

General web crawlers today are harmed by the noise of blog cross-linking, link bombing (aka Google bombing), and commercial efforts to skew PageRank scores

To see how meta-search can lead to improved results, consider how electrical engineers perform averaging of noisy signals, which cancels out random noise and reveals the original noise-free signal. Since web noise affects regular search engines in different ways, meta-search filters noise by averaging the votes of the underlying engines, revealing the consensus best results.

They have to get in front of the users, and to do that means overcoming branding. Millions of dollars and years of work go into branding. But Internet users have been demanding more of their online experience. That’s why video has become more important online.

Search may be going that way too. It will be interesting to see if someone like a Rupert Murdoch takes an interest in pushing metasearch to the masses. Imagine Bart Simpson saying “Clusty is my hero” on Sunday night. Think that would push usage a bit?

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.