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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.