New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google

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."

Comments

Klutsy?

[mfh]

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.

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 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?

[mfearby]

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?

[meza]

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?

[It'sYerMam]

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... :|

Re:Klutsy?

[RotJ]

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 until it's production stable" before worrying their asses off about the marketshare its gaining.

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.

So is Google is using evil Microsoft tactics by adding a news search, newsgroup search, image search, directory search, university search, special search, price search, local search, catalog search, definition search, Klingon search, calculator, translator, weblog, email, and photo organizer? Do you think this make Google bloated or a better service?

As far as clustering goes, I'm pretty sure NortherLights.com was marketing it as its key feature back when it was still competing in the consumer search market. Seems their enterprise search engine still has it: "Automatic classification. Northern Light has patented, proprietary technology that classifies every document in the database by subject, type, language, and source. We provide a complete 17,000-node subject taxonomy developed by our expert gang of librarians that is extensible and customizable. Our classification powers advanced search forms, vertical search applications, and our patented Custom Search Folders(TM) for results navigation."

is going to try and take Google head-on.

[jdkane]

named "Clusty"

A cute name is a start.

Gossip filter

[IwannaCoke]

Instead of being able to search through just gossip, I would be more interested in being able to filter out all the gossip.

Since when is search a solved problem?

[hanssprudel]

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...

Not impressed; but more competition is good

[Quixote]

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.. ;-)

Encyclopedia? Bah!

[Zeddicus_Z]

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.

Dada

[mfh]

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. :-)

Search is a dialog, not a ranking

[G4from128k]

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.

tabs

[dancedance]

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?

i just couldn't care less in such cases

[l3v1]

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.