Clusty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clusty is a metasearch engine developed by Vivísimo which offers clusters of results. Vivísimo is a company built on unique Web search technology developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers. (Interestingly Lycos, a search engine that was popular a decade earlier, was also developed at the same university.) Clusty adds new features and a new interface to the previous Vivisimo clustering web metasearch. Different tabs also offer metasearches for news, jobs (in partnership with Indeed.com), U.S. government info and blogs. Customized tabs allow users to select sources for their own metasearch to create personalized tabs.
Clusty has free toolbars for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, as well as a Mycroft Project search plugin for Mozilla and Firefox.
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[edit] Clustering
A cluster is a group of similar topics that are related to the original query. The clusters are presented to the user through the Desktop metaphor of Folders. The aim of this search engine technique is to organize numerous search results into several meaningful categories (clusters).
The user benefits include:
- Get an overview of the available themes or topics.
- Via one or two clicks on a folder and subfolders, arrive at interesting search results that may be too far down in the ranking.
- View similar results together in folders rather than scattered throughout a list.
[edit] Search Example
A search on Clusty for "Apricots" returns the clusters:
- Dried (67)
- Delicious (13)
- Glazed (3)
- Sweet, Juicy (3)
- Fresh (4)
- Kitchen (3)
- Other Topics (2)
- Orange (9)
- Turkey, Export (11)
- Chocolate, Dipped (12)
- Fresh apricots (11)
- Peaches, Nectarines (11)
- Salad (7)
- Apricots Know (7)
- Chicken (7)
Many of these clusters can be opened, as "Delicious" has been, for further refinement.
