Online search site clusty.com organizes results in useful clusters

Online search site clusty.com organizes results in useful clusters
By Tom Gromak
The Detroit News
Sunday, December 19, 2004

Watch out Google: There’s a new search tool on the block.

A beta version of clusty.com has gone online, promising a new way to search the Web — in clusters.

Users enter search terms the same way as in any search engine, but the results are different.

They’re grouped, or clustered in ways that make sense, such as by topic, by source, or by Web address. So, rather than returning a simple list of search results ranked by the underlying algorithms’ perception of page relevance, users also get an expandable list of topic folders.

For example, a search for “Achilles tendonitis” returned 174 results ranked by page relevance. But a sidebar also listed topical folders such as “health,” “foot,” “treatment,” “rupture,” “running” and “wraps and relief.”

Topic folders can even have subtopic folders for more search results. Organizing search results this way makes it easy to drill down to the information users are seeking.

Clusty has even more useful tricks:

Tabs across the top — like the ones employed by Google — also allow users to quickly switch from a Web search to a search of news sites, images, shopping sites, online encyclopedias or gossip, each with similar clustered results.

The Images tab, for example, lets users search for online images, then cluster them by size, so users are not stuck clicking on tiny thumbnails when searching for pictures of your favorite celebrities.

A Customize tab allows users to add still more tabs to their search results.

Clusty searches far fewer pages than Google, and it can’t display “cached” versions of pages the same way Google can, but Clusty is worth adding to your Internet search toolkit