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I'm just a code monkey, but I know that we are targeted at the enterprise and intranet markets. I'm not 100% sure on the hosting, but our salesfolk are fairly straightforward about answering such things... You can check out some of our customers to get a feeling of some of the companies that use our software. Chances are good that you have actually used our code at some point in the past and never even known it...

• Offers connectors to repositories such as file servers, MS SharePoint, Documentum, Lotus Notes, Exchange, Legato etc.
• Crawls information in databases such as SQL Sever, MYSQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle and Sybase.
• Supports many file formats including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PDF, Postscript, email archives, XML, HTML, RTF and others.
• Rich media including images, audio and video.

Completely correct. However, having a taxonomy of some type is still useful. That's why an automatic taxonomy, generated from your result set, can be extremely useful. Check out clusty.com for an example.

If security is important, you should take a look at Vivisimo Velocity. We offer access control down to the content level. Have a single result document with a title, a snippet, and a piece of sensitive info like money amounts? You can make it so that only select users (from LDAP, or AD, or wahtever system) can see the sensitive information, but everyone can see the title and snippet. We also respect the security restrictions from our content sources, such as Windows fileshares or Documentum. And I've heard from customers that we have easily replaced their Google Appliances, and we can be installed on any commodity linux/solaris/windows box.

The company I work for, Vivisimo, makes an awesome search engine. Although I've never dealt with the Google box directly, I know that we have had customers get fed up with the Google box and replace it quite easily with our software. Click the first link to see a pretty flash demo, or go to Clusty.com to try out a subset of the functionality for real. We specialize in "complex, heterogenous search solutions", which exactly fits most intranet sites I've seen. Files are on SMB shares, local disks, Sharepoint, Lotus, Documentum, IMAP, Exchange, etc, etc, etc. We connect to all those sources and provide a unified interface. You can do really neat tricks with combining content across multiple repositories, such as metadata from a database added to files on SMB shares. We support Linux, Solaris, and Windows, all 32 and 64 bit. Although I may work here, it really is a great product, and I use it at home to crawl my email archives and various blogs, websites, forums, things that I use frequently but have sucky search.

http://vivisimo.com/

http://www.vivisimo.com/ is the company.

however, their search engine can be found here: http://clusty.com/ , which also appears to be in the list.
maybe you also want to re-bookmark it, as the page is much nicer :)

Have you tried Vivisimo? http://vivisimo.com/html/enterprise

Actually, the suck-iest (is that a word?) search engine name is Clusty. Oddly enough, the name of Clusty's parent company, Vivisimo, is probably also ahead of A9 on the "suck meter".

The weird thing about it is that I believe Clusty's seach engine is much better than Google. Go ahead and try it, check out how it clusters the results.

This is old hat. http://vivisimo.com/ has been doing this for ages. I guess that this is only 'new's to those that won't, or can't look beyond google.

I am interested in results. I understand that more pages indexed means normaly a better result. However I just want to get to the information I can se for whatever it is.

http://vivisimo.com/ is an engine I like using, becaue there you can get to things that you want rather quick without the need of looking though pages and pages of non- relevant pages.

Although it's been extensively hyped in the "Google killer" topics, I still find Vivisimo to be extremely useful. I don't use it for my main search, but if Google is too broad, off to Vivisimo I go.

Compare Google's results for 'world cup 2006' with the results from Vivisimo / Clusty.

Uh, no. Anyone with with half a brain and decent programming skills can create a search engine to compete with Google. Here's Wikipedia's explanation. The existence of a powerful competitor such as Goole does NOT mean that someone else can't do exactly the same thing as Google. And, hundreds of HotBots or Vivisimo's will eventually chew away at Google's share.

I think they could buy Clusty from Vivisimo. The clustered search is real handy and it's something I haven't seen Google do yet.

is the ability to filter out certain types of sites. Like the sites that are webinterfaces to Usenet or sites that sell stuff.

When I now look for a digital camera, I get hunderds of sites trying to sell me one, then a lot of sites that talk about it till I get to the makers homepage. an example The page I am looking for is this one
Vivisimo makes it a bit easier, but not completely.

A9 also failed to produce the correct page.

That is due to the advertisement content of websites. With following installed extensions: Download manager Tweak, Nuke Anything, x, Tabbrowser Extension, BugMeNot,Objection, Configuration Mania, fireFTP and loading http://www.tomshardware.com/ main page in four tabs, http://www.vivisimo.com/ search engine, and this slashdot article page memory usage on my own system less than 39030K.

Interesting, I did a comparison. Now, I happen to own a Via Rhine based NIC so I did a vague search on the string "Linux via-rhine" (without the quotes) on Google, Teoma and Vivisimo. The string doesn't imply anything except that I want my results to show something about Linux related to via-rhine (or vice versa).

In the Teoma Results the first hit of 51,600 was a forum post where someone asked "Trying to install LMD 10 using a Via motherboard with onboard Rhine NIC configuration asks for additional parameters - anyone know these please?" It was about someone having problems with an onboard Rhine chip on Mandrake, very short, not much detail and not particularly interesting (nor would it have been helpful even if I was having problems with it).

In the Vivisimo Results the first hit of 51,600 was to a mailing-list post where the topic was "VIA Rhine problem in 2.4". Someone was having an obscure problem with a D-Link dfe-530tx, probably not what I'm looking for. Ironically there was a link in that post to what turned out to be the first hit on Google, and the mailing list post was actually an answer from a company employee at Scyld Software, which brings us to Google..

In the Google Results the first hit of 99,400 was to "Linux Drivers for PCI Ethernet Chips". The link was to a page at Scyld Software, a Linux company. It had information about several Linux kernel drivers (including Via Rhine/II) along with usage instructions, module settings, support options and diagnostic programs - not to mention a direct link to the driver source code. What I could learn from this hit was a lot, including the fact that I can use the via-rhine driver to both Rhine as well as Rhine II chips.

What I found most interesting about all this was not the results (they speak for them self) but rather the number of hits. Theoma and Vivisimo had the exact same number of hits which leads me to believe that they share the same indexes but filter the results differently (Indeed, the second hit on Vivisimo was the same as the first one on Teoma). I admit, Vivisimo has a really cool interface, especially the "Clustered Results"-thing, but the quality on the hits arent nearly as good as those of Google so none of them are Google replacements, yet. Well, that's my conclusion based on this shallow test anyway.

Oh, and thanks for the links btw - they're going into my collection.

May be Google has done some nifty things with their file-system, but can't we forget about it already? Their search hasn't changed much http://www.google.com/">in the past six years. Of course, the fanboys will salivate over Google calculator and Google unit converter, but on the scale of Internet these "innovations" barely register.

Some of the other search engines are comparable in quality to Google (Teoma, Vivisimo), and may be better, depending on how many points you take away from Google for spam-infested results, too many blogs, too many Wikipedia clones, too many commercial sites, etc. And some sites are so much further on the innovation scale (meet BrainBoost, an artifically intelligent Internet reference desk answering any questions asked in natural English, with amazing quality and accuracy in a very friendly and usable interface) that they put Google to shame.

FYI -- Clusty is owned by the folks that created vivisimo.

How about vivisimo? The name sucks, but the tool is great.

Humans would also be better at clustering the results into categories.

sounds a lot like vivisimo: search tree

Use vivisimo instead of clusty. It is the same search engine/company, just different names. If you search use Vivisimo, the sponsored links aren't quite as obnoxious. Unfortunately, the firefox extension uses Clusty, not Vivisimo.

As for the names, both of the suck big-time. "Vivisimo" and "Clusty". Geez. I remember a few years ago, Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting decided to change their name to "Monday". I wonder if the folks at Vivisimo hired anyone from PWCC, because their names suck almost as much.

Interesting, the first thing I thought is I had seen this with Vivisimo, but I guess no one could spell that so the changed the name?

http://vivisimo.com/

But I agree, it is a great search engine and has gotten better as I have used it.

Now, if they will just accept regular expressions.

Classic newbie mistake. The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. Adding regular expressions or stemming makes your answer set even bigger.

What we need is ways to make the answer set smaller, not larger. Hence the benefit of clustering, for example (see for example http://vivisimo.com/search?query=search+trees&v%3A sources=Web).

That Google Thing Is So Yesterday

Of all the advanced mathematics classes that I took, one thing that stands out for me is that out of many possible solutions it was hard to just jump to the right one - what always had to be done was to select a "seed" and then improve upon the feedback that was provided ...

Google suggest is one step in that direction. You key in the first alphabet and then you get feedback ... some day it might anticipate your question itself because so many other people have asked the same question - that to me is a more realistic goal than trying to anticipate the answer.

In other words the direction of the research should be to anticipate quickly (like google suggest does) what the person is trying to ask rather than what answer the person is expecting. I know the differnce is subtle enough to raise the question of if I am saying anything different. Yes, it is - just like 2 isomers are essentially the same in construction but very different in effects -

there is a big difference in trying to anticipate the question that someone wants to ask versus anticipating the answer they are expecting.

1. No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
   
2. 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
   
3. 7 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
   
2. Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
   
3. 10 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
   
2. 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
   
3. 5 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.

1. No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
   
2. 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
   
3. 7 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
   
2. Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
   
3. 10 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
   
2. 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
   
3. 5 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.

Suprisingly, I didn't see anyone mention it. So, may I suggest:
http://vivisimo.com/
Much easier to navigate than Google, thanks to clusterings that actually make sense (usually)!

You should check out the next generation of search engine to see how that problem can be effectively solved.

Why do Clusty when 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.

Such a mass cashing-out could lead to a decline in Google stock price and intellectual brain-drain

Google's main revenue stream is a cash-cow (google-ads/froogle(?)) so there's little danger that present employees leaving will significantly damage the stock price in the near future.

In the end though, after all the hype and rather trite-sounding platitudes about "thinking outside the box", google is just a search company. And there are others who are already doing that better

because of the companies integrity.

Try alternatives: Vivisimo which offers clustered searching (quite nice, actually), or or Lycos old, but still working, or any number of other search engines. I like Google's functionality, I like many of their extra features. I will be writing to Google, asking them to stop aiding the Chinese government in its abuse of the Chinese people. I will also be trying to avoid Google, because I *do* think that their integrity is gone, and I do not think that I can trust their results anymore.

My first experience was terrible. I clicked on a result and it was opened in a frame. That immediately ruled it out of my list of potential Google successors.

Vivisimo and Teoma are looking good so far but why is it that none of them can use basic web standards properly?

Time for a plug. My favorite search engine is this. Doesn't give you exactly what you are looking for, but it uses clustering technology. The clustering of the reulsts, IMHO, makes it easier to sift through the results than either Google or Jeeves.

Yeah, it sure is slick, at 92 kilobytes... In comparision, Google main page is only 9 kilobytes, of which 8 kilobytes is the logo. Result pages are upwards from 100 kilobytes. This includes bloated table-based design, some ugly javascript hacks of undeterminable usefulness, sign in for a search engine instead of anonymous cookies and a fucking diary!

While A9 may not win any bloat contests among search engines, calling it "slick" is a bit of a misnomer.

When I am in the mood for some indie searching, I'd rather use Vivisimo, Teoma or All the Web.

P.S. A9 may be great and all, but at 100KB per page I am not using it.

Hey space ghost, you forgot to include a big, honking, link to Vivisimo! Do you think anyone could *spell* "Vivisimo" in this hemisphere? Sheesh!

The interesting fact is that competing engines such as Vivisimo, Teoma, AllTheWeb and of course Yahoo are basically as good as Google.

Vivisimo in particular often works better than Google (for me, it may not for you). Many times I failed to find what I wanted because Google returned results (several pages) which are somewhat relevant, but not what a search for these multiple keywords should return. Vivisimo, on the other hand, usually had 100% relevant results near the top.

With an already profitable business, and lots of extra money in its pocket, can we expect Google to start a buyout spree? Some targets might include Vivisimo with their clustering technology, Girafa for visualizing search, or even some of the better Web APIs applications like Google Alert or the GoogleBrowser, as this Wired story suggests.

or even better ?

http://vivisimo.com/search?query=browser+statistic s&v:sources=Web&sourceid=Mozilla-search

So - where is google heading now?

Personally, when I saw that google was restricting the share emission to U.S. persons, I got relatively pissed off at them. I didn't intend to buy any shares of them, but to restrict access to the shares seems hardly "fair". I don't know how quickly the US would step in if some well known company abroad would effectively forbid US investors to get any stock from them...

In reaction to this, so far, I've reduced my usage of gmail (intend to drop it completely shortly) and google is now a "fallback" when I need a search engine - vivisimo.com looks more and more appealing everyday. And since google doesn't want non-US-persons to invest in them (at least not for the IPO), my guess is they don't want non-US-business either. And I'll try my best to honor it.

Right now, I'm just curious whether I'm the only one to take such measures, or whether others did so as well.

There is more to search than Yahoo, MSN or Google.
How about Vivisimo, Teoma and AllTheWeb. Diversity is always good. I will find with other search engines things that you will not find on Google alone. And additional search features like clustering at Vivisimo are great.

they probaly make me 30% more effective

I hope they soon find a way to filter out sites that just put one or moreUsenetgroups on a website. The same goes for mailinglists.

When I am looking for something, I have to weed trough pages and pages of the same posting again and again. I start to use http://vivisimo.com more and more. The quality of the results is getting less and less.

Google is known for their new and interesting technologies. I stumbled across this search engine right before reading this article actually. A search engine that clusters your results! It makes it even faster and simpler to get right to what you want. It's nice to see new ideas like this coming out and helping to change the direction of search engines as google did several years ago.

http://vivisimo.com/

vivisimo.com does this to some extent, it doesn't assign less weight, it simply sorts the results into categorized folders, and if it has blog entries -- it places them into a blog folder. Here is the example of a query of a well known blogger.

And even if you don't like vivisimo, you still have plenty of options. You can look for other good search engines. And/or you could copy the Google page and hardcode the negative criterion "blog" into the url string.

In any case, if you do decide to screen out the word "blog" from your searches, it would be interesting to see how useful Google will be after that. At least with bloggers/forum posters, there are so many of them and they produce so much content, most of their links and most of their recommendations are a lot less biased than most commercially-driven web sites and news sites.

vivisimo.com does this to some extent, it doesn't assign less weight, it simply sorts the results into categorized folders, and if it has blog entries -- it places them into a blog folder. Here is the example of a query of a well known blogger.

And even if you don't like vivisimo, you still have plenty of options. You can look for other good search engines. And/or you could copy the Google page and hardcode the negative criterion "blog" into the url string.

In any case, if you do decide to screen out the word "blog" from your searches, it would be interesting to see how useful Google will be after that. At least with bloggers/forum posters, there are so many of them and they produce so much content, most of their links and most of their recommendations are a lot less biased than most commercially-driven web sites and news sites.

There's no reason why you'd necessarily need to train it - Bayesian clustering can look for similarities in documents, and use model-selection techniques such as MDL or BIC to determine the most information-efficient arrangement. No doubt that's the kind of thing that is used over at Vivisimo, which automatically clusters search results.

Clustering search engine

Fun new one to try: Mooter

Look - if a search engine was a schoolbus, Yahoo would be the short one.

When Yahoo and Google learn how to properly catalog php pages without requiring mod_rewrite fudging by website owners, perhaps then it'd be worth investing in some ads. After all, if website owners can get it to work, why can't they?

Also - when Yahoo can effectively filter out the link-redirect scams going on, it might be more enticing for potential advertisers. Paying for the "opportunity" to be listed amongst top-ranking link scammers isn't worth much, IMHO.

As for websurfers, I'd suggest Vivisimo. There's nothing better than clustered results!