Sometimes it is surprising to see a new search engine enter the market, considering the current market space. Three search engines account for over 90% of the referrals, while another dozen or so account for about 7%. So when a new one comes out, it is worth telling you about.
has been a company we have been watching for some time, ever since they announced that they were working on their own search. In fact, they were more or less a meta search engine for quite a while.
Then they announced a new type of search - a clustering search engine. In general terms, what they do is find results for your query within clusters, or groups of results.
A search for "cheap book" for example, returns results for travel, books, and more. You can either then look at the currently displayed results, or click through the clusters that may match your query.
For example, if you were really looking for a way to book a hotel cheap, then you could click on one of the hotel clusters. Each click into a cluster (and corresponding sub-cluster) refines your search results.
Further, you can search across multiple sources. They have the usual web news and images search, but they also have a dictionary. And you can personalize it by adding Ebay, blogs and even Slashdot.
There are a couple of other neat features we have already seen on other engines - you can click on a magnifying glass and see the site open up in a window on your search results (similar to Ask Jeeves preview button). You can click on the cluster button and it shows you what clusters the search result you are looking at belong to. Also, they have a detail link at the top of the page showing which engines they queries, and which one returned results.
Overall, some interesting features. Is it going to become a major player? I don't think so. They are entering keyword search too late in the game. Others like Blinkx will be more of a threat to the big 3 than Clusty will. Because while Clusty can do many of the things a meta search engine can do, it is limited to keywords.
Of course, I am certain that they will win over some people who are disgruntled at the other players out there, but in reality I don't see them making much of an impact. Their technology is great, but a little late. And I don't think the average user will understand the whole clustering aspect.
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
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