Improvements to internet search
Vivisimo Clustering - automatic categorization and meta-search software -
I realize that this has been around for a while, but I never really think about its existence, and am thus inspired to comment upon it. Largely because I found myself comparing it to this company Mooter, which also does search clustering, but does it much more poorly. My main complaints about Mooter are: (1) 2 clicks to do anything. You have to pick a cluster before you see any actual search results. (2) It's very unclear at first that the 7 clusters displayed aren't all the clusters it found. Why do they only display 7 clusters at a time?
In contrast, Vivisimo gives you a list immediately, but also shows a large list of clusters at the left, which is clearly a subset of the total clusters. This is really a great technology, and depending on the type of search you're performing, it could very often be more useful than Google, because if you're looking for something which fits easily into multiple completely unrelated categories (pythons, for example), it allows you to very quickly select only the relevant information (the snake, not the comedy troupe).
I wish they didn't use the Yahoo! ad model, though, with the ads listed first like search results, rather than the Google ad model, with the ads on the side.
- posted by Hoff @ 3:42 PM