Free consumer Web search service launched yesterday clusters results into categories to make them easier to sort
SAN FRANCISCO - Google executives have long conceded one of their great fears is to be overtaken by a more advanced Internet search technology. Vivisimo, a company founded by three former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, hopes to prove their worries are well founded.
Four-year-old Vivisimo launched Clusty yesterday, a free consumer search service based on results from Yahoo's Overture engine.
Vivisimo already offers a search service for corporate customers, which clusters results into categories to make them easier to sort. Search 'swift boat', for example, and Vivisimo returns 149 results - listing them one by one, and also presenting them as a table of categories, like 'Swift Boat Veterans', 'John Kerry' and 'Patrol Craft Fast' on the left-hand side of the webpage.
The new Clusty service for consumers, which will be free and supported by advertising revenue, uses a similar organisational structure. But it also presents a series of tabs enabling the user to see results from sources besides the general Web, including shopping information, yellow pages, news, blogs and images.
Vivisimo, which is privately held and is profitable, according to its executives, has sold its clustering technology to corporations for research. Now Vivisimo is making an effort to compete more broadly by attracting consumers to its new website, clusty.com
The service is meant to address the confusion that can be created when search engines return huge lists of results. Clustering is also intended to help users find related material they may overlook when they employ services that use page ranking methods. Such methods employ a variety of software algorithms to rank webpages by their perceived relevance to a query.
Many search experts said clustering offers a better way to look at information than Google's page ranking system.
'As databases get larger, trying to pull the proverbial needle out of the haystack gets tougher and tougher,' said Mr Gary Price, a librarian who is also the news editor at SearchEngineWatch, a website that covers the industry. 'Here, you're getting a bit of extra help.'
Vivisimo chief executive Raul Valdes-Perez was a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University before he co-founded the company. He said the way to deal with information overload is information 'overlook' - techniques that strip away extraneous information.
Clusty will generate money for Vivisimo by placing several search-related advertisements from Overture on the right-hand side of each page. Revenue from the ads will be shared by Vivisimo and Overture. Unlike many start-ups, which are launched with venture capital financing, Vivisimo was created with help from a US$1 million (S$1.7 million) grant from the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research programme, which is designed to stimulate technological innovation by new companies.
Vivisimo is not the first to introduce clustering for Web surfers. Northern Light, a search engine company founded in 1996, offered a consumer service featuring what it called 'custom search folders'. But the company now focuses on corporate applications.
Google also uses clustering technology, but in a more limited fashion: Its news page provides links to topics that appear on various news sites. -- New York Times
