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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."
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
But anyway, this does look interested.
I think there's your first clue for why your story was rejected.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Instead of being able to search through just gossip, I would be more interested in being able to filter out all the gossip.
...but not one that reminds me of "Clippy".
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...
Under the heading "House" are the news items:
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.. ;-)
not a very reliable porn search engine.
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.
/. about.
Bah.
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
Janie took my gun...
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!
After having just searched for "BinaryWrite ASP Stream" to see if it might produce the goods in trying to solve a little web page problem I have, clusty did actually turn up something I hadn't seen before. Maybe it is going to be OK?
0 416966), the world's latest addition to the steaming heap of soon-to-be-abandonware :-)
Back when Teoma came out I remember thinking the same thing, but soon forgot about it.
And yes, I have seen Linux. I was until a year ago a perpetual new-distro-installing-slut to see if Linux was up to scratch. Sadly, I still have to tinker and fiddle with the thing to even get it to recognise a frigging USB mouse (SuSE 9.0). Said USB mouse (Logitec optical) worked beautifully during the installer, but after rebooting, refused to work in X.
Hey, mabye I should install Syllable 0.5.4 (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=124146&cid=1
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
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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?
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.
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
on a search for "MILF" by putting the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in one category, and separating the more "mature" content in others.
/.'ers can think of other ambiguous search words where clustering helps. The UI could use some simplification, but otherwise I'm impressed.
It's not perfect, but it's a good start. I'm sure
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.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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?
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!
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?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
"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.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
"Yeah, I use that new search engine. Crusty. Er, Colostomy. Er, Callusy, or whatever."
>I think clusty.com is better, but now makes me think of unclean prostitutes.
And Google makes me think of clean prostitutes!
Free iPods? Sure!
Well, I guess that's one way to do it...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.