Slashdot Mirror
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."
Guess you don't use Linux then. But all in all this actually has a chance against Google. I tried it and it makes way more sense than Google's just throw everything into a huge heap of 1000s of links approach. I think I've got a new search engine.
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 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!
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.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
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?
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 social contract" appear deep into a search on Debian, it comes front & center on a clustered search.
If this catches on, I'm certain that people will figure out how to game that too. One feature that I'm surprised was never implemented is an option to suppress meta-engines from search results. That would clean up results a lot.
Finally, a search engine that correctly bubbles wikipedia above the spam clones (and read the reply to this post too). Google doesn't even show wikipedia at all on the first page, even if expanded. Kudos, you've won your first (?) customer!
The biggest "feature" of the toolbar is the popup blocking..which Moz users don't need
At any rate Firefox has a box in the corner that's directly linked to google
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)