Ever just sit around and make plans for, oh, say, global domination? Tony Philipp has. In fact, the new European President and Executive Vice President of Business Development at Squirrel Hill-based Vivísimo founded Lycos/Europe in his living room in Munich.

The Austrian Trade Commission organized a group of 25 delegates to visit the United States to learn about trends and issues in economic development.[...] "Our delegation wants to learn from companies that have successfully commercialized a technology by utilizing both community and university resources," stated Peter Gatscha, from the Austrian Trade Commission. "We look forward to our visit with Vivísimo because they have had international success with their technology and they have utilized public economic development resources."

Vivísimo sends queries to other search engines, then concentrates on presenting the best results drawn from a wide variety of sources. It does this by "clustering" and organising results pages into different topics. This means a search for "venus" will return results clustered into categories for the planet, the Wimbledon runner-up, the mythical goddess and so on, rather than clumping them all together as a traditional search engine would.

Check out vivisimo.com, the featured site on our Friday June 7, 2002 Tech Live television program.

Vivísimo receives high praise from leading critics of the search engine field. Gary Price, co-author of The Invisible Web and Webmastery columnist for Searcher magazine, is a big fan and uses it all the time[...] He particularly finds the clustering useful. He said: Unlike Northern Light folders, which are pre-mapped to a fixed taxonomy structured by librarians, Vivísimo creates its clusters on-the-fly using terms taken from the brief descriptions or snippets in the search results[...] When IOPP tested the clustering feature with in-house experts, [Lloyd] Fletcher reported that the Vivísimo treatment was judged 90-percent right in its clustering.