September 30, 2004

Search engine upstart Vivisimo is trying to convince people that Google isn't the most efficient way to find things on the Web.

The little-known Pittsburgh company is taking aim at Google and other industry leaders like Yahoo Inc. with a new search engine called Clusty.com, scheduled to debut Thursday after four years of fine tuning.

The search engine's name refers to the clustering technology that Vivisimo has refined to sort search results into different categories related to the initial search request.

For instance, entering "San Francisco" into Clusty.com's search box produces a set of general results at the center of the Web page, with a list of more specific categories, such as "Bay," "Hotel," "Art," "University" and "Giants" featured at the left. Clicking on any of the subgroups delivers a new list of links in the center of the page while still preserving the different groups.

Other search engines, most notably Ask Jeeves Inc.'s Teoma.com, offer similar clustering approaches, but Vivisimo's approach has been hailed as the most sophisticated and user-friendly.

The clustering technology is meant to simplify online search by breaking down results into related categories instead of bunching them in a single listing that can span tens of thousands of links scattered across hundreds of Web pages.

"There is almost too much information on the Internet now," said Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez. "We think we have a better way to differentiate the results."

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Valdes-Perez's likens Vivisimo's clustering system to a book store that stacks its selections by subject matter or author instead of just scattering all the titles across a sprawling floor.

Vivisimo already has attracted a cult following among the online cognoscenti who use a sample search engine offered on the company's Web site. The site handles about 6 million search requests per month - an amount that Google processes in less than an hour on a typical day.

Despite its low profile, privately held Vivisimo turned profitable two years ago, Valdes-Perez said. The 20-employee company, seeded by a $1 million grant from U.S National Science Foundation, collects most of its revenue from licensing its technology to other Web sites.

Valdes-Perez, along with Vivisimo co-founders Jerome Pesenti and Christopher Palmer, decided the unusual spelling of the company's Web site frustrated visitors and prevented more people from discovering the clustering technology. That inspired the decision to launch a separate search engine under Clusty.com, which is expected to make money by displaying text-based ads common on other search engines.

Naming the new search engine Clusty probably wasn't the best choice, said industry observer Chris Sherman, predicting many people will confuse the site with Krusty the Clown from the TV show, "The Simpsons."

But Sherman does believe Clusty.com's approach will appeal to the widening audience of Web surfers who are becoming more discriminating as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves add more bells and whistles to their own search engines.

"The search engine experience is becoming much richer," said Sherman, editor of Search Day, an industry newsletter. "The big question for (Clusty) is whether it will be able to generate enough buzz to get people to come try it out."

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Clusty isn't relying solely on its clustering technology to make its mark. The site also is introducing a feature that offers customized index tabs devoted to Web blogs, or "blogs," online gossip and online auction giant eBay.

Supplanting Google as the Internet's search kingpin won't be easy, partly because the company's name - also once ridiculed as a silly - has become synonymous with looking things up online.

Google controls 36 percent of the Internet search market, trailed by Yahoo at 29 percent, according to the latest data from research firm comScore Networks. Software giant Microsoft Corp. hopes to make the market even more competitive with its own search engine at MSN.com.

Clusty also covers a small slice of the Web compared to the better-known search engines. The site will crawl 5 million to 10 million Web pages and draw upon the indexes of other sources to supplement its results. By comparison, Google crawls 4.3 billion Web pages.

"We don't think it matters if you are crawling 5 million or 5 billion pages because no one looks at more than a handful of the results anyway," Valdes-Perez said.

Source: Forbes

        

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