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."
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.
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.. ;-)
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?
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.