Doing A Clusty Search - 4 Things You'll Love About It

First things first.

Clusty...

You're asking yourself, what in the world is a Clusty?

Well, it's not a grape, it's not a medical condition, and it's not a clown (that's Krusty).

Clusty happens to be one of the coolest and most innovative search engines to hit the Web in a long time. It's so well done, both technically, and visually.

If there ever were a new search engine to give Google and Yahoo a run for their money, Clusty would be it! I expect to hear a lot more about it in 2005.

Now, before you go and get all impatient, wanting to take it for a spin, let me share with you 4 things that I think you're going to love about your Clusty search experience. They include:

• Clustered results
• Pop-up definitions
• Preview frames
• Extensive search options/resources

Clustered search results -  This is Clusty's biggest breakthrough feature (it's also the basis of its name). Instead of just giving you line-after-line of search results related to your search, Clusty is intelligent enough to cluster (group) results in a meaningful way, which will help you find exactly what you're looking for with minimal effort.

To understand how this works, I did a search for sailing on Clusty. The results page contained a section of clustered results, making it easier for me to locate any specific information related to sailing that I might be interested in.

That's really smart, isn't it? When I hear all this talk about how search is just in its infancy, it's innovations like this that are moving it up to the toddler-stage, maybe even further, like to snot-nose-kid status!

Pop-up definitions - Using our sailing query once again as a basis for an example, the results page also contains a definition link, which when clicked, pops-up a small window with definitions of your search keyword(s).

OK, it's not terribly groundbreaking to provide a keyword definition from a search engine, but I think the implementation (using a pop-up window) is.

Preview frames - I've seen this feature on several other up-and-coming search engines, so I don't know who came up with it first, but who cares - it's a great feature.

UPDATE: I received an email this morning from the CEO of Vivisimo (creators of Clusty), Raul Valdez-Perez, PhD . It was a really pleasant surprise. He wrote to extend his thanks for this review and to share with me the fact that the preview frame feature was something that his team had developed several years ago.

Thanks for the clarification, Raul, and congratulations on Clusty. I can't wait to see how you propel your product forward (can it get any better?)

The way it works is that each item in the search results has a small magnifying glass icon next to it. When you click the icon, the Web page representing the search result will open right within the Clusty search results page, meaning you don't have to navigate to it, find out it's not what you wanted, navigate back to Clusty to continue your search, and repeat this process until you find what you're looking for.

You can think of the Clusty search results page as your information command center. Once again, it's very well done.

Extensive search options/resources - The folks at Clusty didn't take the approach of just getting the main Web search engine functional then adding other search features later. No, they launched with their search-guns blazing!

Clusty allows you to find items related to your keyword in numerous search categories:

• Web
• News
• Images
• Shopping
• Encyclopedia
• Gossip
• eBay
• Blogs

Clusty's powerful clustering technology extends to each of these search categories. Until you see it in action, you can't really appreciate it's usefulness.

Is this a small glimpse of the future of search?