Clusty Search Engine Marketing

Clusty was launched in 2004, and takes its name from its primary function-it clusters results into categories. Clusty is owned and operated by Vivisimo (founded in June 2000 by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists) and is based out of Pittsburg, PA. Vivisimo’s clustering technology was originally offered as a product for other businesses, and the Clusty site was set up to demo how the technology worked. Due to its increasing popularity and demand, Vivisimo decided to take a run at the industry and made Clusty a dedicated search site. As of September 2005, Clusty was still in beta.

Clusty is a meta search engine. It retrieves its results from well-known engines and directories, such as Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Open Directory, Teoma, Gigablast and Wisenut. If you wish to be found by Clusty, it is important to have your site listed with the engines and directories it spiders. In order to be listed and remain in these indexes, your site should undergo search engine optimization by a reputable SEO service. Submission directly to Clusty is not possible at this time.

Vivisimo’s clustering technology is very interesting. The clustering algorithm organizes search results into a host of categories based on textual and linguistic similarity. Human heuristics (human level accuracy) have been coded into the algorithm in order for this process to happen. It groups similar results into folders, breaking them up with a high level of detail and organization (other engines can return results in an unorganized fashion, and it can be complicated to obtain the exact results you are looking for). By placing categories in this manner, it allows for more organized and quicker searches. An example is Seo services. Under Web, a search for Seo service reveals the folders: Design, Search Engine Optimization services, Search Engine Marketing etc. Each folder (found at the left hand column) shows the number of results returned within that folder. Folders are ranked by a combination of SE rankings and Clusty algorithms.

Clusty may return different results for the same search. The reason for this has to do with the behavior of the engines it queries. If one of the engines it normally queries is down, for example, it will return different results. Furthermore, Clusty avoids returning duplicates. If multiple pages with the same material are found, Clusty will discard the multiples.

Clusty offers a deep set of search features. Results can be obtained under the headings: Web, News, Images, Shopping, Wikipedia, Blogs, and Jobs; you can customize which tabs are visible. Moreover, under these various headings, you can you can cluster by various types. For instance, if performing a search under Web, you can obtain results under topics, sources, and URLs. Under Images, you can select size, name, type or URLs.