It's been a busy year for the major meta search engines, with a number of notable developments [...] Vivísimo announced Release 4.0 of its award-winning clustering engine.

Vivísimo is working on a different approach to the presentation of news search results. Its test news site, which has not yet been revealed to the public, spontaneously clusters links to news articles according to subject.

Vivísimo which this week made a deal with Infospace, provides "clustering" technology that groups similar search results together. [...] What's especially interesting for search marketers is Vivísimo claims users click on 30 to 100 percent more paid listings when presented with search results organized in its hierarchical folders.

While the rest of us are sifting through page after page of our "Google" search, Squirrel Hill Internet search clustering developer Vivísimo Inc. has quietly been adding big-name customers for its software that makes searching the Web more efficient.

Vivísimo listed on the top of the list of Google alternatives.

Search engines work. They do. The problem is they work too well. The needle you're looking for may be hidden in a haystack-size pile of other needles. That's where metasearch engine Vivísimo and its clustering technology comes in.

I've been a longtime fan of Vivísimo, and the addition of its clustering technology to Dogpile results is an exceptionally useful new feature [...] In testing the new interface, "74% said clustering provided a better experience," said Leslie Grandy, vice president, product management for InfoSpace.

Instead of having to trawl through a huge list of results, which you'll probably lose interest in very soon, Vivísimo clusters the results together and describes them in easy to understand and helpful topic groupings.

Vivísimo is a capable metasearch engine, serving results from multiple engines simultaneously. Dig a bit deeper and you'll find some powerful, unique features not found elsewhere on the web.

After last year's detour to San Francisco, the Search Engine Meeting returned to Boston [...] Raul Valdes-Perez, president of Vivísimo, suggested that many people solve information overload by "information overlook"simply ignoring much of the data they retrieve. Using a statistic from Evans' keynote address, Valdes-Perez asked, "How many documents can you open in the 12 minutes before search rage occurs?"

Getting answers to broad, exploratory questions can leave searchers slogging through a morass of information... Vivísimo filters and automatically categorizes responses from search requests. The results resemble a human-generated index that can help guide searchers in the right direction...thereby helping to identify trends or fine-tune searches without requiring users to know the correct terminology.

Vivísimo named the winner of the Best metasearch category for the 2nd year in a row. vivisimo.com not only pulls back matching responses from major search engines but it also automatically organizes the pages on-the-fly into categories in an "easy-to-view format."

Vivísimo displays the topic areas on the left side. This provides the user with a rapid overview of the most significant aspects of the content search... A search for Iraq is categorized into nice clean topics like "Soldiers", "Iraq War" and "United Nations".