Sourced from Search Engine Watch
Vivisimo has launched Clusty, a meta search engine with an impressive array of tools that helps you quickly find relevant results from a variety of information sources.
Clusty is an elegant new search tool that takes underground favourite Vivisimo to a new level. In addition to presenting both standard web search results and Vivisimo’s dynamic clusters that automatically categorize results, Clusty draws on several new sources of information.
Clusty is designed to be a consumer web search destination, rather than a technology showcase on the Vivisimo corporate web server. Previously, Vivisimo has licensed its technologies to others, such as InfoSpace’s Dogpile meta search engine.
Impressive features
Clusty allows you to use Vivisimo’s dynamic clustering technology on ten different types of web content including material from the web, image, weblog and shopping databases. You can access each type of search by simply clicking a tab directly above the search box.
You can “customise” which tabs are visible by clicking the customise tab and then selecting from a list of database types. This is a very useful feature and one we haven’t seen from many other search tools. Yahoo offers something similar if you use the search.yahoo.com interface. Future releases of Clusty will allow you to add tabs for your favorite search tools, according to Valdes-Perez.
The “clusters” presented in search results are incredibly useful. For example, a web+ search for Heathrow Airport offers three types of clusters on the left side of a results page. By default, results are organised into topic categories including hotels, parking, and airport lounges. It’s also possible to expand these clusters to further focus your results set by clicking the + (plus) sign next to each cluster title. Clusters are created dynamically by analysing words in the text, url, and result snippet.
You can also cluster results by source and by URL. These different views save you time finding the best results (what Valdes-Perez calls “selective ignorance”) and also helps you see ideas and concepts that might go unnoticed otherwise.
Rich Sources Of Information
News and weblog junkies and researchers alike will be happy to know that Clusty provides several new and exciting tools.
You’re now able to meta search and cluster results from several web-based news providers and aggregators including the Yahoo News, The New York Times, and Reuters. Results are dynamically clustered and can be viewed three different ways.
Clusty also automatically builds news topic pages, similar to Google News for several news categories including “Top News”, “World News” and Business. To access these “pre built” pages simply click “search” without anything in the search box.
Clusty’s news search and cluster capabilities are also applied to content from the blogosphere by aggregating results and dynamically clustering results from several weblog and RSS databases including Technorati, Feedster, and Daypop.
Local search is also supported. Searching for some locations or a zip codes with Web will not only return web results but also a map (via MapQuest) and clustered results from a yellow page database.
A few other feature are worth noting. First, the very useful “Details” link located at top of every search results page. If you select this link a box will appear giving you info about which databases were queried and how many results were retrieved.
Next to each page title on all results page you’ll notice a magnifying glass icon. When you click this icon a live version of the underlying page will open embedded into the results list. Unlike similar services that offer static images next to results, this “preview” version is live, and all of the links are hot. In other words it’s possible to search, check results, review potentially useful pages, and visit other pages, without ever leaving the search results list.