Say Hello to Clusty, a Cool New Meta Search Engine

[Chris Sherman]

Say Hello to Clusty, a Cool New Meta Search Engine

Vivisimo has launched Clusty (http://www.clusty.com), a meta search engine with an impressive array of tools that helps you quickly find relevant results from a variety of information sources.

Despite the awkward name that conjures images of Crusty the Crab from The Incredible Mr. Limpet (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058230/) (or the Simpsons Clown, depending on your tastes), Clusty is an elegant new search tool that takes underground favorite Vivisimo (http://www.vivisimo.com) to a new level.

Today's SearchDay article, Reducing Information Overkill (http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3415071), covers Clusty's cool new features in depth.

Comments welcome!

Chris

[doppelganger]

Without a doubt there are some cool features here...

An encyclopedia search using wikipedia (nice)
The "clusters" (tree menus) in the left nav (nice)

But a Google competitor? Maybe an Ask Jeeves competitor right now, but not a Google competitor at present...

In order to compete with Google, I think you'd need to have a brand that's on the same level. "Clusty" clearly is not... This is a horrible name, and has little to no brand potential in my opinon...

Here's why:

1.) "Clusty" makes people think of gross things like crust, etc...
2.) Because it's an abbreviation for clustering, it evokes annoying nicknames

"Aw... Who's my little clusty wusty..."

I mean seriously... who's going to say: "Hey, I Clustied you last night and found your blog"...

[doppelganger]

One more thing...

What's the opinion on Meta Search?

No meta search engine has any significant market share... So can that change? Or has the model already proved it doesn't work...

[sandra]

I agree about the name, but I also seem to remember people saying exactly the same thing about googly woogly and yahoo?

[cpikas]

other nice things: searching LII and FirstGov

bad thing: I knew from NYT that it did blogs, but it didn't initially occur to me to click on the customize tab to find out how! Plus, why so many blogdigger homepage hits in the results?

I don't see crusty, I see busty. I definitely don't like the name

[halfacat]

1) Terrible name - 'What the hell is clusty? You mean Klutsy?' Not something I am expecting quality results from.
2) Layout(Form) - Too busy, learn from Yahoo and M$ who followed the G. I am not on your site to be entertained, I am there to get information.
3) Layout(Function) - Options are not clearly defined. These new choices on the left dont make sense, what do they do, why should I use them? Paid listings are too blended with organic results.

Oh and the name is just awful. 'You already said that.' I know and I will continue to sneer and snicker and use Google.

[JohnW]

The type of sites being rewarded by Clusty reminds me a lot of Google back before Nov 2003. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

[I, Brian]

The name is awful - and the presentation isn't clear enough for general user use.

But it could be a very useful tool for SEO's looking at linkage patterns.

[Brad]

Overall, I like it. This is the first meta-search that I have seen in a long time that did not make me yawn. ;)

Name: we are all talking about it, which means we will probably remember it. That is half the battle right there.

SE's: I like the lineup of SE's. They produce some pretty good results on limited testing. I like that DMOZ is included by default.

Directory Tab: I would still like to see a directory tab (it could be one of the options) because I do like drilling down through a directory. I guess DMOZ would be a logical choice but maybe one of the second tier directories could be used?

I like the inclusion of Wikipedia, LII and FirstGov.

They need a FireFox/Mozilla search plugin like yesterday.

[Seramar]

I think this is a good preview of what the semantic web can and maybe even should be like. If the semantic web ever takes off (like it should, imho) then I think something like this will be a very good model for how related information should be laid out.

I'm not going to sit here and debate whether or not clusty will ever become as mainstream as google. I understand the name sounds stupid. But then again, what the hell was a google before a few years ago? Makes me think of goo and gulls. Makes me think of porn and birds. Maybe it's a porn search engine for women?

Just kidding :-) but seriously. As advanced searchers, who cares what the name is if it offers you new power? I ran some recent queries on both google and clusty... and I'll tell you what, over half of the time I found the information much quicker on clusty than on google. And I haven't even begun to optimize my clusty search skills like I've been doing for google for the past 4 (or more?) years.

I've got my eye on this one.

[mesadynamics]

I think Vivisimo is definitely on to something with Clusty -- especially for the consumer search market -- but for keyword research I think the power of clustering is best left to the client, like theConcept (http://www.mesadynamics.com/theconcept.htm) (disclaimer: I'm the developer). If you've got the bandwidth, then you can do your own clustering.

IMHO, clustering is the first step towards true context analysis: a more likely path for the "future of search" than the easily-abused, tag-dependent Semantic Web.

[Everyman]

I like Clusty. Clusty does not set a cookie unless you customize. If you do customize, Clusty's cookie does not contain a unique ID. I asked Clusty about this and they confirmed that they have no plans to use a unique ID in their cookie.

The Yahoo crawling backing up Clusty (via MSN) is competitive with Google, and Clusty also uses Gigablast. The clustering is quite good.

[bazac]

Clusty is OK, but I like more www.ez2find.com

A search for “daniel bazac” in Clusty gave me 140 results, while in ez2find 312.

Daniel Bazac
New York.