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The Internet

New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google 189

Posted by CmdrTaco from the coulda-used-a-better-name dept.
Sophrosyne writes "The New York Times is reporting a new search engine [free if DNA on file with Homeland Security] named "Clusty" is going to try and take Google head-on. The new search engine was developed by three former CMU computer scientists who formed the company Vivisimo. The search engine uses Overture for it's results but offers new features such as an encyclopedia search, clustered results, and a gossip search."
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New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google More

New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google

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  • Klutsy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:08AM (#10419222) Homepage Journal
    New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google
    More like New Clustering Search Engine goes Beta. Let's wait until it's production stable before talking about who it's going to take down in a fist fight reminiscent of the Spock/Kirk battle in Amok Time [ericweisstein.com].

    Clusty by Vivisimo? Did I even spell that right? They need to consider naming things that people can:
    A) pronounce
    B) spell
    C) are actual words or at least close to words that qualify for both A & B.

    Clusty sounds like something you would call the fat cheerleader. It also will be often mispronounced as Klutsy, so it's a very bad name for a search engine (of all things).

    The search engine uses Overture for it's results but offers new features such as an encyclopedia search, clustered results, and a gossip search.

    This is a Microsoft tactic: add features to get market share, and it's an evil tactic because nothing new comes out of it, except bloat and bad karma. The fact this is based on Overature leads me to believe that it won't be able to take Google head-on at all. Clusty uses the Google interface but shows sponsored results first (evil), and displays 404 pages [clusty.com] in the results. (FYI dteam was the first 3d design guild that is no longer)

    I don't think they really have a hope of competing with Google. If it ain't broke don't fix it, so most people will just continue to use Google.

    • Re:Klutsy? (Score:5, Informative)

      by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:11AM (#10419235) Homepage Journal
      The original engine was actually called Vivisimo,
      and the exact point you make was mentioned back then.

      heres the article (january)

      http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/05/1839233.sh tm l?tid=126&tid=185&tid=95

      I think clusty.com is better, but now makes me think of unclean prostitutes.

      • Klitsy? (Score:3, Funny)

        by Donny Smith ( 567043 )
        >I think clusty.com is better, but now makes me think of unclean prostitutes.

        And Google makes me think of clean prostitutes!

    • Re:Klutsy? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mfearby ( 1653 )
      It's probably called "clusty" because of all the domain-name hogging scum out there getting fat off registering everything they can think of to extort big bucks! Who would have thought of registering google, huh? Back when it first came out I remember thinking "google: what a stupid name!". Now, it has become both a noun and a verb in most peoples' everyday speech

    • Re:Klutsy? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:23AM (#10419273) Homepage Journal
      They need to consider naming things that people can:
      A) pronounce

      Well, Google has got everyone beat in this regard. "Google" is probably the first thing a baby says (and hence I'm sure it is hardwired into our brains). The only thing that could beat "Google" would be "dada" or "burp". Any takers?

      • Dada (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mfh ( 56 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:36AM (#10419320) Homepage Journal
        Well, Google has got everyone beat in this regard. "Google" is probably the first thing a baby says (and hence I'm sure it is hardwired into our brains). The only thing that could beat "Google" would be "dada" or "burp". Any takers?

        You joke, but a search engine named Dada would likely be well received for the name, and if it was a good system it could find a nice user base. I mean it has taken Google *years* to perfect its systems and they started with a good premise: do no evil. That was when all the search engines were cashing in on ads. A lot of people were turned off of the internet because of that, until Google came along. So it was purposeful, not evil, and light/easy to use.

        My suggestion to anyone trying to take on Google is that they should do something else unless google becomes evil, and because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely -- it's just a matter of time before Google turns evil. Maybe not, though. :-)

        • Re:Dada (Score:3, Funny)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
          The problem with a search engine named "dada [google.com]" is that when you searched for articles on cutlery you'd end up with a picture of a haddock impaled on a pitchfork being held by a naked man wearing fake breasts. Probably not what you were looking for.
        • Dada is good but shows a desire to be superiour, Dog's probably better :)

          --

          And because I'm only going to make one post and crawl into bed, the color scheme is horrid, the layout not very frienly, and the dialogue options for advanced searches so un-organised it's painful to use.

          Fix the name, colors and layout, and it'd actually be a contender against google. I'd say borrow from everyone else other thank ask jeeves and go with a nice clean white background with easilly readable results, clearly layed out

      • Dada would be... (Score:5, Funny)

        by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel.handelmanNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @09:30AM (#10419533) Journal
        A search engine that finds pages containing the words you typed which are *least* likely to relate to your actual underlying question. A google of the absurd, as it were.

        This could be very, very difficult. How would you implement such a thing, from a technical standpoint?

    • I totally agree on the naming issue: I was thinking "Klusty the Clown"??? And "Vivisimo" sounds more like a toy company to me.

      The interface isn't gonna sell it either. It reminds me more of http://alltheweb.com/ [alltheweb.com] (at least the front page) though - but uglier.

      • Re:Klutsy? (Score:2, Informative)

        by br0ck ( 237309 )
        According to the CEO [sunherald.com] the awkward name and the Krusty similarity were both intentional.

        Valdes-Perez said his company dumped the name Vivisimo for the search engine because it was ``an obstacle.''

        ``It's a name that is difficult to pronounce and type and spell. Other than that, it's a great name,'' he quipped.

        But the new name may face similar challenges, Valdes-Perez acknowledged. Though it is easy to remember, for many people Clusty evokes the name Krusty the Clown, the not-so-kid-friendly character on ``
        • klusty just sounds like a disease.

          I wonder if they thought of "vivis"? Kind of sounds cool... most cultures can pronounce it, and it has no tricky syllable combinations. It's evolved from something related to project, and it's easy to remember and not mix up letters from memory.

    • Re:Klutsy? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by meza ( 414214 )
      Clusty by Vivisimo? Did I even spell that right? They need to consider naming things that people can:
      A) pronounce
      B) spell
      C) are actual words or at least close to words that qualify for both A & B.

      The main reason why I used altavista for so long was actually because I didn't manage to spell google right. Honestly. I had to try all kind of combinations everytime I wanted to go there, like gogle, googel, gogel. I should also say that english is not my native language.

      • Re:Klutsy? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by It'sYerMam ( 762418 )
        Google's pretty much a misspelling, anyway. The original word is 'googol' meaning 10^100. Incidentally, this was the £1,000,000 question on WWTBAM, when the cheater was on. He didn't know it, but everyone in my family did... :|
      • >The main reason why I used altavista for so long was actually because I didn't manage to spell google right.

        Have you heard of bookmarks or autocomplete? ;-)

        By the way, I never used Altavista because it reminded me too much of Asta La Vista, I had difficulties remembering which one was the right one.
    • I click on your 404 page link and get nothing but links to sites about dteam except for one solitary link... I'm not sure that's a bug as you've just found a loophole in the engine where if you search for a page that's gone, has the name in it's link, and hundreds of sites link to, it's sure to get a 404 page. All that says is they need a routine to get rid of the 404 pages!

      However I agree with you totally in one point - Clusty is already totally bloated. If you look at google itself's example who won
    • I agree with you but..

      They are using Linux with Apache .. Good but no site should provide this kind of details open! Look at google and Yahoo, they don't provide accurate information on these issues.

      Results are clustered that's the only think I love right now. But I'm dam sure rest of competitor get this stuff soon
    • They need to consider naming things that people can: A) pronounce B) spell
      Sure the spelling of Vivisimo will already have been mentioned on Slashdot, but for that reason I call it viv-aiy-simo...

    • Re:Klutsy? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RotJ ( 771744 )
      More like New Clustering Search Engine goes Beta. Let's wait until it's production stable before talking about who it's going to take down in a fist fight reminiscent of the Spock/Kirk battle in Amok Time.

      Whether it's beta or not doesn't matter. Google picked up most of its steam by word of mouth while it was still in beta and was already on its way to becoming the dominant search engine by the time it took off the beta tag. Just look at Google's own Gmail beta. Hotmail and Yahoo! didn't have to "wait
    • It's not just using pure Overture, it's a meta-search, it seems to be mixing in Google results with Overture/Yahoo results.

      Google has sponsored results too. At least they're separating them out from the main index, like G does.

    • Did you ever notice that the popular website names often have nothing to do with what they are really are ?. of course they in turn get added to the vocabulary... but see the examples.
      • Google [google.com] -- a huge number , and nothing to do with searching, per se
      • Amazon [amazon.com] -- WTF does Amazon have to do with book, rather supply the wood ?
      • Monster [monster.com] -- Monster ?. and jobs ?.
      • Ebay [ebay.com] would BuyHere.com sounded better ?
      • Slashdot [slashdot.org] what does "Slashdot" mean actually ?. "Slashdotted" ? (ok, sourceforge makes sense for one).
      • often a single syllable catchy name is all it takes :).

        Not according to your examples - every one is multisyllabic...

        Of course, your main point is dead on. I suspect the problem with thematically-related site names is built-in. Take books - you'd remember "related name", then would try book, bookstore, library, text, novel, etc., rarely if ever going back to the right site.* The fact that "Amazon" wasn't one of the taken-for-granted synonyms for book meant that people had to make the unlikely menta

  • named "Clusty"

    A cute name is a start.

  • Gossip filter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IwannaCoke ( 140329 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:12AM (#10419239) Homepage
    Instead of being able to search through just gossip, I would be more interested in being able to filter out all the gossip.
    • withoutGossip = normalResults - gossipResults;

      ;-)

      Somebody did an "unclean search" for Google using normal search and "clean" search results the same way but I'm too lazy to google for it.

  • Since when is search a solved problem? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hanssprudel ( 323035 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:19AM (#10419262)
    So everybody is waiting for the next great search engine to come along and out-google Google, but it seems to me that they are looking in the completely wrong places.

    All Clusty, A9 and the other more recent search engines seem to do is add more gimmicks to search results from yahoo and Google respectively. To some extent, this seems to be exactly what Google is doing recently as well: the searches are hardly getting beter, instead we can search news, search references (try define:), search printed text, do automatic conversions, etc etc.

    But the truth is that not only are the searches at Google not getting better: they are getting worse. It seems like PageRank is more or less unused nowadays, and Google just uses easily manipulated things like searchterm in URL, searchterm in Title, how recently updated, to rank pages. I think anybody who uses Google to search for specific things must have observed that it works only a fraction of how well it did when it was new.

    So what is going on here? Does everybody consider the basic searching a solved problem, and that we don't need to find pages better than google does? Or is a good search that cannot be manipulated really an intractable problem?

    If I owned Google stock, I would really be wondering how many of all those thousands of PhD's at the Googleplex are working on this, and how many are writing gimmicks and elegant webmail applications. Or maybe one of them already proved that the problem can't be solved, and Google is just hoping to make as much money as possible before the secret comes out...

    • All Clusty, A9 and the other more recent search engines seem to do is add more gimmicks to search results from yahoo and Google respectively.

      But Clusty's clusters seem like a nice gimmick. Do a search for 'Debian', and it returns the usual, but with options to look at the clusters 'Debian GNU', 'Install', 'Package', 'Reviews', and so on.

      Of course, these clusters don't work very well for every search. It's anglo-centric, and searches for things that are unknown to the English speaking world get some really

    • I think search IS the killer feature. However, just trying to be _better_ than Google is not going to do it. The company/service that will succeed in being better than Google will also have to come up with some alternative ideas and approaches to solving the same problem (finding a needle in a haystack). One of the approaches is to create a service based on humans instead of crawlers - and before you say it - I am not talking Yahoo or DMOZ-like directories and such. I'm talking what some people are call
    • The problem is optimisation. When something becomes the search engine, moving up 1 or 2 rankings can become a matter of great monitary importance and people start to game the system. To fool page rank people started to use wiki's to artificaly raise the number of links to thier site. To fool word counters(this was a while ago) people used to embed a hole lot of comented out gibrish at the bottom of their pages, and when they atarted parsing it out, they stated just taking on the text and making it visable o
    • You point out the exact benefit. In most searches where it could apply, your first five pages are mata-shopping engines. People are using tactics like creating stupid page names based on popular searches that the manage to push to the the top of the rankings.

      This is a battle that will always go on. Change your page rank system and people will just start gaming it again.

      What Clusty/Vivisimo accomplishes is that by clustering data, it takes sequence out of play. Even if my preferred pages for "Debian's soci
    • There's plenty of room to improve on Google. I wish Clusty good luck and I hope the competition benefits us users all the more.
    • Apparently M$ doesn't think so, they're building a new SE for MSN.

      Google has been pretty stagnant for months now, but it was always easy enough to manipulate, and is generally considered harder to game now. Right now they are not giving good rank to most new sites for some reason, perhaps to fight "SE spam."

      Google is probably in the process of massive overhauls too. It hasn't really updated its algorithm much in months, and many people believe we're in for a big shake-up.

      Certainly there is no such thi

  • Not impressed; but more competition is good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:20AM (#10419263) Homepage Journal
    I didn't RTFA (I'm a regular, I don't have to) but I tried out Clusty. In particular, the News section.

    Under the heading "House" are the news items:

    • Gunmen Attack Mauritania Security Chief's Home (Reuters)
    • U.S. Policies Stir More Fear Than Confidence (Los Angeles Times)
    • N.Y. Auction Houses Expect High Totals (AP)

    And under the heading "Record", are listed:
    • As Reservoirs Recede, Fears of a Water Shortage Rise (Los Angeles Times)
    • NASA Delays Plans to Fly Shuttle Soon (NY Times)
    • San Jose State, Rice Set Scoring Record (AP)
    This shows that just a clustering technique isn't enough; you need more context. Google (IMHO) does a better job of clustering their news results.

    Having said this, I wish Vivisimo all the luck. Google needs more competition; it is what will give us the Next Great Search Engine(tm).

    Ob: I, for one, would like to welcome our new clustering overlords.. ;-)

    • The news section appears to be a search engine for Reuters.
    • I just gave this a try searching for "SQL 1203" as I have spent the last two days trying to fix a 1203 error in SQL Server. Now, Google of course was the first place I went. While I got many, many results, I had to 'manually' filter out about 50% of them as irrelevant.

      I gave 'Clusty' the same search and it really did reduce the amount of time it took to get the relevant information. Yes, most of the results were the same, and I didn't get any new answers for my problem, but I did get to the information f

  • Nothing (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's rubbish. Just look at the results when searching for "large breasts". Nothing of any interest what-so-ever. Nothing!
  • but i have to say, the gossip search needs to index more sites, and the image search is still no match for google's.

    not a very reliable porn search engine.

  • Encyclopedia? Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zeddicus_Z ( 214454 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:26AM (#10419287) Homepage
    The submitter had me all excited there for a minute or so, but unfortunately the "encyclopedia search" he mentions is simply searching the wikipedia.org site. Now don't get me wrong; there's absolutely nothing wrong with wikipedia, however it's already a web resource. You've been able to "encyclopedia search" Wikipedia for AGES by appending "site:wikipedia.org" into a google query.

    Now if they'd done some sort of deal with Britanica to gain search access to its online library, THAT would be a resource worth posting to /. about. Bah.
  • ...an effort. Google has become a verb, and an adjective! Heck, I hear it (Google) was even added to the English dictionary. The other day I was googling the drug "Cogentin", and sure enough, I got it. I have always googled and would comfortably ask anyone to google in case they cannot find info they need. I wish them (those who hope to compete), the best.

    Cb..

  • I occasionally used Vivisimo's search engine years ago (I don't know if it had any association with Overture at the time).

    It would take the search results and place them in categorized folders so that you could narrow down the search. Naturally, they picked the categories.

    I suppose some filtering would be nice, but do I really need them to do something I should have done when I came up with my search parameters in the first place?

  • Slashdot Tab (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the default tabs you can add to its interface is for Slashdot.

  • Hrmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by t7 ( 591821 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:30AM (#10419299) Homepage
    How many people actually jump on the "bandwagon" and switch search engines just because some one says it's "new and fresh"?

    I gave a9 [a9.com] a try, I like the interface and some of the new features like the search history and the multiple search panes. But shortly after I found myself using google again. Even though a9 uses google, and the results are almost identical, I didn't find anything compelling enough to make me switch.

    Does anyone else feel they might be missing some results if they were to use another search engine?
    What must a new search engine provide to "steal" users from google?

    Free iPods? Sure! [freeipods.com]

    • With .sig: (Score:3, Funny)

      by FooAtWFU ( 699187 )
      What must a new search engine provide to "steal" users from google?

      Free iPods? Sure!

      Well, I guess that's one way to do it...

  • Why do Clusty when Vivisimo.com [vivisimo.com] was already working just fine? If I want Google, I'll use Google, not an imitation-Google. And vice versa, if I want Vivisimo, which is useful sometimes, I'll simply use Vivisimo. I certainly don't need a cross-breed of the two.
    • Because this "rebranding" generates a large amount of publicity they could never buy.

      Even on Slashdot, a lot of people didn't know about Vivisimo.

      Now you do.

      The money they put in the rebranding is FAR less then wath this amount of publicity would cost to buy.

  • A better mousetrap (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrshowtime ( 562809 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:35AM (#10419317)
    I have always considered Google's best point, is it's utter simplicity in design. Also, the name is easy to remember. Anyone who wants to up Google has to not only be MUCH better, but also have a good name and be as easy to use as google. Before, in the old days, each search engine produced sometime wildly different results. At the time, HotBot was the best search engine going, but they lost their steam and was ultimately "replaced" with google.
    • Not entirely true.

      Back in the days, when the search engine war begun, I had no problem typing in http://www.altavista.digital.com or whatever, it was simply my choice of search engine.

      Today, google is my primary choice, but if they will ever bloat it with more than it is today (neat, simple and honest!) I will search for a better one, the one which suits my needs the most, or a page which simply parsers googles results and presents them nicely, in short terms, something nicer.

      Google's powers is not in th

  • It's more impressive than Slashdotters realize (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Everyman ( 197621 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:40AM (#10419328) Homepage
    First of all, "uses Overture results" strikes me as misleading. They have an agreement with Overture to share the proceeds from the sponsored links.

    The results include MSN and Gigablast and Lycos. Basically, that means Yahoo's crawling plus Gigablast. Yahoo has ramped up their crawling since March, and is on a par with Google. They've been slow about passing all of it to MSN in a timely fashion, but by now MSN has most of it. I think Lycos, which also uses Yahoo's Inktomi, is about the same as MSN.

    The clustering is the best of any search engine, meta or otherwise. You don't have to have JavaScript enabled, which is a big plus over the Vivisimo interface I remember from a year ago.

    Finally, I was delighted to see that Clusty.com does not set a cookie unless you customize. Even the cookie for customization looked like it lacked a unique ID. I emailed Clusty and they confirmed for me that they have no plans for a unique ID in their cookie.

    Google tracks you with a unique ID across all of their services, and saves everything it knows about you. Google's cookie expires in 2038.

    Now I ask you, why do Slashdotters feel the need to dump on Clusty?
    • I was going to say, if it were based solely on OVERTURE'S results then the only competition it would have would be Gator/Claria's horrid Searchscout/GAIN system [pcpitstop.com], which is the only "major search engine" I know of that is powered purely by Overture results. Though to be fair when Overture runs out of ads it just dips into the Yahoo/Inktomi pool and runs those listings instead. So I guess its not TOTALLY worthless - try for yourself at http://www.overture.com [overture.com]

      By the way, the Gator/Overture partnership has got [eweek.com]

  • Mozilla search plugin from the actual company (Score:4, Informative)

    by palfrey ( 198640 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:46AM (#10419351) Homepage
    Now there's a first. Not even Google has ever directly supported Mozilla - the Google toolbar from Google is IE only. And this one now has a Mozilla search plugin link on the front page. Kudos.
  • how do you add your site to the results? all my searchs so far have come up poorly and none of my sites are on it, so of course i think its lame :D
    plus the name, as stated in previous comments, sounds like something ikky, like a cockroach cluster or something, nifty idea and design though sponsered results suck being in the results and not on the side
  • .n

    Simply because for *many* kind of searches, for example looking for a supplier of aluminium extrusions for heatsinking, ALL google's top returns are for OTHER fucking indexing sites like fucking kellysearch and NOT fucking sites owneed and run by aluminium extruders.

    This is a trend that has become ever more prevalent over time, and it makes google ever more irellevant.

    this will of course get modded troll, see journal

  • It beats Google (Score:3, Informative)

    by danharan ( 714822 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:57AM (#10419390) Journal
    on a search for "MILF" by putting the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in one category, and separating the more "mature" content in others.

    It's not perfect, but it's a good start. I'm sure /.'ers can think of other ambiguous search words where clustering helps. The UI could use some simplification, but otherwise I'm impressed.

    One neat consequence for web marketers will be more targetted traffic. With Google, you have to hope searchers will be savvy enough to use 3-4 keywords to search for exactly what they want- if they can click on two more KWs that refine their search, we'll see the inventory of cheaper 3 KW terms go up significantly.

  • Search is a dialog, not a ranking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:59AM (#10419397)
    The basic concept of any kind of PageRank is flawed because it assumes a monotonic ordering of sites on some single scale (e.g., popularity as defiend by linkage). The problem with PageRank is not the use of links to assess popularity, but the presumption of a single scale.

    The search of "Apple" illustrates this well. This search, like many is deeply ambiguous. It could refer to the computer company, to the fruit, to the record company, to New York City, to the singer (Fiona), or to Apple Valley (MN or CA). Even if the search engine knows that it refers to the computer company, it's still ambiguous. It could refer to the company (as an investment), the products (for purchase), or a question (as in technical support).

    The point is that each of these ambiguous alternatives creates an independent cluster of hits. One cannot even rank hits within a cluster due to a hierarchy of ambiguity. Within the Apple computer cluster are distinct subclusters for computer purchase, investment evalaution, and technical support. Although one can create a ranking within each subsubsubsubcluster, it is impossible to construct a meanful rank for all hits across all clusters - the second hit for "purchasing an Apple computer laptop" is not comparable to the 2nd hit for "Apple Records".

    Instead of a pagerank scheme that sorts the universe of hits the instant the user enters the search, search engines should be more interactive. The first page of hits would emphasize breadth -- displaying hits most representative of a broad range of alternative clusters. The UI would enable a "more like this"/"fewer like this" selection process that tells the search engine what the searcher is actually looking for. As the searcher selects hits, the subsequent pages might show popularity-ranked hits within the clusters that seem to interest the searcher.

    Each hit and each page would serve a double-duty -- serving the searcher's need to get information from the internet, and answering the search engine's question about the needs of the searcher for that particular search. Until the search engine understands each searcher and each search, it cannot hope to rank the hits.
  • the clustered results are awesome!!! it is like google and northern-lights combined!!!

    nothing really big about the encyclopedia search, it just mirrors wikipedia which already has a good search engine for its articles....unless clusty adds something like natural language search or a close to search I see no benefit for using clusty over wikipedia.
  • It has the word 'lust' in it. And it sounds real bad in my language (close to 'fart').

  • tabs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dancedance ( 600701 )
    Like google, clusty can seach for/through: images, news, ebay, blogs, and . . . SLASHDOT? I was quite supprised to see that it can be customized to have a slashdot tab at the top. The other interesting thing I noticed is that there is a link on the main page to "mozilla search plugin". I am not able to actually follow the link, but it would seem to suggest that they are interested in supporting OSS. Who do you think they are trying to target?
  • After trying it, it appears to be a little bit better than google. For one, it has that fast, spare interface that set google apart in the beginning.

    And these clusters are a great idea.

    Definitely worth bookmarking!
  • <shameless plug>

    theConcept [mesadynamics.com] is a client-based clustering/thematic search engine that works with Google, Wiki, DMOZ and other search engines (it data mines result and analyzes most significant keywords from the source pages). If you have OS X, you can check it out for free.

    </shameless plug>

  • Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! It puts Wikipedia first! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @09:12AM (#10419464)
    Finally, a search engine that correctly bubbles wikipedia [clusty.com] above the spam clones [slashdot.org] (and read the reply to this post too). Google doesn't even show wikipedia at all [google.com] on the first page, even if expanded [google.com]. Kudos, you've won your first (?) customer!
  • I am a big fan of all things Google (I **love** their SOAP API - free use of the Google backend; the limit of 1000 hits a day is no problem for me because I just use it for a NLP question answering prototype) and one of my best friends works for Overture.

    That said, I think that Clusty will do very well. I use Firefox and Safari for my browsers; after breakfast I am going to configure one of them to use Clusty by default.

    One thing that make Clusty so interesting to me is that I have been working (for the l
  • "Clusty" is going to try and take Google head-on.

    Maybe this will give Clusty the crown.

  • Google has had this for a while - its the allinurl advanced search option.
  • Vivisimo was the search engine I liked a few years ago. The reason I kicked them to the curb went something like this:

    "Hey Vivisimo guys, we're starting up a new company here and you have a very powerful results format. What would it take to license your engine to help organize and present our data to the public?"

    Vivisimo's answer: Well, that depends on how much money you're going to make of course. Exactly how much money do you have and do you expect to make?

    Google's answer: We're designing a hardw
  • Frankly, I don't see what's so great about clustering. It feels non-intuitive to me. And it doesn't appear to improve the quality of my results.

    For example:
    I search for 2600. I want information on the Atari 2600.
    As soon as I realize that 2600 is a hacker magazine, I add the word "atari" to my search.
    Why is this harder than clustering?

    I do like the Open in Preview Pane feature, though.
    --
  • Irony (n), 1. Learning about a Google competitor from a screen-scraping bot called Google News.
  • If you go to Customize, you can add your own Slashdot tab.

    But it doesn't work! A simple search for "Grits" [clusty.com] or
    "Linux" [clusty.com] return 0 results.

  • Marketing Slip-Up... (Score:3, Funny)

    by One Childish N00b ( 780549 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @10:30AM (#10419907) Homepage
    "Ewww, Jimmy's got a clusty in his hair!"

    - I refuse to use anything that sounds like children's slang for a bogey or some other lump of offensiveness. Whoever thought that name up needs to be drummed out of marketing forever. The layout of the main page is reminiscent of Ask Jeeves (which is a bad thing, it automatically makes me think 'bad searches') and search pages look cluttered and the vivid background against the soft shades of the foreground looks awful. This 'Clustered Searching' is a good idea, badly executed. Next please.

  • What's it's name... (Score:3, Funny)

    by karniv0re ( 746499 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @10:42AM (#10419983) Journal
    "Yeah, I use that new search engine. Crusty. Er, Colostomy. Er, Callusy, or whatever."
  • If Google is my hands for the web, Clusty is going to be my eye. I can swipe my hand through water in a pond, or sandhills on the beach, and get an idea of what is out there on the web, *in the order of popularity* (because backlinking is so important).

    I have no problem with this way Google works, I found backlinking to be tremendously useful when implementing a gigabyte-sized database on htdig, and Google "just works".

    Clusty on the other hand works to reduce my information saturation, it will reduce the
  • They have a search extension for Mozilla based browsers, which is certaintly somewhere where they stand out against google.
    • I guess their recognition of Mozilla makes them stand out, but it's not bad for Google, as every version of Mozilla I've used has had a Google search extension built into it.

      Also, it only takes about 15 minutes to write a search extension. Tons of them exist; just Google for one.

  • i just couldn't care less in such cases (Score:4, Insightful)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @01:13PM (#10421025)
    Am I the only one who is fed up reading like "company A developed a new search engine which uses company B's search engine by adding revolutionary and world shaking features like thinking instead of you"...

    If some are so revolutionary, then why are they using someone else's engine by adding some stuff most people most probably never find out what to use for. Doesn't A9 ring a bell for anyone, or does it.

    I have an idea. Let's make a totally new and ground breaking search engine which will use Google's results, but hey, the main idea: let's have a different logo and paint the site pink !

    Geez, I sometimes just can't stop wondering about all the freaky things that money can be earned from these days.

  • New clustering search engine makes Slashdot front page, falls into obscurity shortly thereafter.
  • Rule #1 of making a search engine to take on Google: Make sure the name of your engine sounds good when used in verb form.

    Rule #2, innovate the actual searching, not just the organizing.

  • I spent the last few days Googling for some obscure Linux SATA driver information... the best Google could give me was some half-coherent mailing list posts on the subject. A quick search on "Clusty" on the other hand came up with more or less exactly the info I'd been looking for.
  • I am the top hit for my own name [clusty.com]. Clearly Clusty is superior -- on Google, some lame journalist comes up first, but, c'mon, who cares about him? Clusty properly files him as the second choice. The better results on this very vital search prove that everyone should switch now. Thanks.
  • Way to go guys. I posted this story on September 30th and it was rejected:

    Googles newest competitor? Thursday September 30, @08:31AM Rejected

    And I didn't even link to a NY Times article but rather an AP story.

    You can see that I have this story listed in my journal at this link [slashdot.org].

    Keep up the good work. This is the kind of nonsense we have come to expect from /.

    P.S. I will usually post some of the stories which have been rejected so be sure to check my journal every so often. Af

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