Friday, September 21, 2007

Is NosyJoe.com the next Clusty.com?

Clusty.com is a well known search engine project basically a spin off from Vivisimo. Vivisimo on the other hand was founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists who decided to tackle the problem of information overload in web search. Rather than focusing just on search engine result ranking, they thought that grouping results into topics, or "clustering," made for better search and discovery.

Clusty in general is a word derived from clustering, in our best guess, and the search engine itself became popular with its function to cluster the web, basically explained. Yet it is know that Clusty queries several top search engines which in its basic means a metasearch, i.e. no own index.

Initially planned to take on Google (Carnegie Mellon University vs. Stanford) Clusty seems did not make it at all and failed to gain the basic popularity necessary to rank among the first 10 search engines in terms of market share. The latest phrase seen in the public about Clusty is: “It (Vivisimo) also has a consumer search engine, Clusty, that allows Web browsers to query several search engines at once.”

On the other hand their clustering technology is considered pretty good one but seemingly other start ups are working on similar ideas, one of them, is NosyJoe -- a small start up search engine -- that is taking the content clustering to the next level.

NosyJoe is still in private beta, however, it was mentioned in NYT this last June and since then the project gained some traction among the search experts on web.

Basically NosyJoe extracts the meaningful sentences, phrases and keywords from the content submitted by the users. It then makes the information pretty much meaningfully searchable, web visible and findable and also clusters it into contextual channels and tags and applies a set of algorithms and user patterns to further ranking, mashing and sharing.

From our quick tests on the site the search results returned were presented in form of meaningful sentences and contextual phrasal tags (as an option), which turns their search results into -- something I have never seen on web so far -- neat content components, readable and easily understandable sentences as search results unlike what we are all used to, some excerpts from the content where the keyword is found in. When compared to other search engines’ results NosyJoe.com’s ones appear truly meaningful. You can check it out for yourself, we have submitted the about page of Clusty to NosyJoe and here is what the site shows it has for the Clusty.com’s domain: http://www.nosyjoe.com/website/www.clusty.com

Another search query done in NosyJoe for Clusty yielded pretty good meaningful results too:
http://www.nosyjoe.com/search.php?q=clusty

Another start up search engine known to be playing in the clustering arena is Quintura, a US based company started out by Russians.

So is NosyJoe.com really the next clustering engine or it is yet another social search experiment.

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