The result? Vivísimo, a revolutionary "clustering" search engine that is transforming the on-line experience.

Several smaller startups, such as Clusty and Vivísimo have also launched a Japanese version of their search platforms in recent months.

Raul Valdes-Perez developed a breakthrough search-engine algorithm. Today, more than 10% of all Internet searches are "clustered" using technology from Vivísimo, his Pittsburgh-based firm.

Vivísimo's Clusty — has built their businesses around what is called "clustering" technology.

To make it easier to understand results, www.clusty.com adds a panel to the left of the results that organizes them into categories.

In an effort to showcase its clustering search technology for the Japanese market, Vivísimo has launched Clusty.jp.

Providing personalized search has become a big focus for sites like Yahoo and Google, but the CEO of Clusty.com's parent company Vivísimo thinks search personalization is a dead end.

A second generation of "clustering" search engines may prove even more beneficial. Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivísimo, the software company behind Clusty.com, describes the company's site as a pair of binoculars.

"Our product, Vivísimo Velocity, organizes results of a search task for our customers," says Peter Pawlowski.

"The ongoing problem is that just about anything you type in [a search form] will lead to an overabundance of information," said Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder of Vivísimo.

Vivísimo offered the company a new way to facilitate effective searching through the use of its proprietary Clustering Engine, which organizes search results into a series of folders.

Vivísimo and Microsoft will offer FirstGov users more organized and comprehensive results from media outlets, image libraries and government Web pages.

Vivísimo has been awarded a federal government contract to provide search technology to the U.S. Government's FirstGov.gov portal.

The sites are powered by Vivísimo Velocity which presents the results in a clustered format, allowing the user to drill down to sub-topics of interest within their search results.

FirstGov.gov users will get search results clustered into groups of related hits through new technologies that the General Services Administration is implementing early next year. Microsoft MSN Search and Vivísimo'’s Clusty.com will power the official government portal.

The search function will rely on software developer Vivísimo's Clusty.com search engine and incorporate results and features from Microsoft's MSN search engine.

Users would benefit from using sites like Clusty ... to find a broader assortment of results.

It's this knowledge that seemingly inspired Vivísimo, developer of the Clusty.com clustering search engine, to introduce an affiliate program where potential clients would be able to integrate aspects of Vivísimo's technology onto their site.

Other search engine specialists remained skeptical about the ability to estimate Web or index size as long as the search engines were being secretive about their methods. "I don't have any good way of checking," said Raul Valdes-Perez, a computer scientist who is chief executive of Vivísimo, which operates the Clusty search engine.

To aggregate search results from multiple sources, the University [of Pittsburgh] early this year deployed Vivísimo's Velocity search engine to perform a federated search of internal resources as well as the third-party publisher sites.

Vertical search engines are back because its cheaper and easier than ever to cluster and correlate information, writes CIO Update guest columnist Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivísimo.

This real-time "dimensionalization" done by Vivísimo is termed clustering. Clustering can result in a different taxonomy each time it's done, based on the search terms and input data.

Using Clusty to search the blogosphere offers an easy way to quickly see results from most of the well-known databases while also allowing you the benefit of dynamic clustering.

Vivísimo Inc. has been tagged by the president of Carnegie Mellon University and by Pennsylvania's top technology investment fund as one of the prime local companies to make the next big jump.

On its 5th birthday, Squirrel Hill-based Web searching company Vivísimo Inc. gave the city a birthday present. Vivísimo has donated the use of its Web-searching tool, dubbed Clusty, to the city of Pittsburgh Web site, at www.cityofpittsburgh.net.

[...] Don Taylor, senior director of life sciences solutions for Pittsburgh-based Vivísimo Inc., said he was able to exceed his goals of solidifying relationships and meeting with prospects, including several big pharmaceutical companies.

Google, Yahoo and MSN dominate search, but we're always on the lookout for an innovative approach. Clusty, the metasearch engine from Vivísimo, clusters results by sub-category to help you zero in on what you need-an approach AOL will take on the new aol.com, launching in July.

Two related sites, Clusty.com and its parent, vivisimo.com, categorize the hits from each search, producing a kind of table of contents of results.

Clustering and query refinement have gained the attention of both search startups and the larger engines. Startup Vivísimo Inc. has put clustering into action in its Clusty search site and as part of the revamped America Online Inc. search.

Vivísimo Velocity 4.2 should be on your short list as a primary information-retrieval platform.

Vivísimo Velocity customizes results from multiple sources—from search engines to specific Web sites—to provide a single source of indexed results for any search.

Vivísimo has introduced a consumer-oriented search engine, www.clusty.com, which tries to deal with the problem of hidden information by displaying a list of folders to the left of the search results, adding an alternative category view in addition to a simple ranked listing.

Over the past five years, Vivísimo, Inc., has been quietly building a solid business one customer at a time while refining its clustering and meta search software. [...] Valdes-Perez says 2005 is truly going to be the year of clustering. Vivísimo's "quiet" time might soon be coming to an end.

Metasearch engines send a user's query to multiple search engines and blend the top results from each into one overall list. A final step can involve clustering the combined results, but both metasearch and regular search engines can be clustered, so the clustering issue is separate.

Search software vendor Vivísimo Inc. has added to its aggregated search site, Clusty, a section exclusively devoted to government resources. [...] users can do a search that will span multiple federal and government-related Web resources, such as FirstGov, the Defense Department's DefenseLink and the government section of MSN.

As of today, Vivísimo's Clusty search engine will add a "Gov" tab (gov.clusty.com) to its existing, customizable set, which includes Web, News, Images, Gossip, Shopping, Encyclopedia, and more.

Another common prediction, and one that falls in line with usability, is for the increased adoption of clustering technology. America Online is already offering clustering via its Vivísimo partnership. Weiner, for one, said he's hooked on clustering, and he expects to see major search engine players add clustering features in 2005 to make search more user-friendly.

Vivísimo (www.vivisimo.com), a relatively new company in my neighborhood, Pittsburgh, has built a new kind of enterprise metasearch tool already in use at NASA, NSA and other government agencies. [...] Users of Internet Explorer or FireFox can add clustering functionality to their Web browsers today by downloading the company's Clusty Toolbar at www.clusty.com. My M theory search using Clusty sorted results into String Theory (43), Music (25), Number Theory (22) and more than a dozen other categories, greatly facilitating my research.

Vivísimo uses natural language rather than imbedded metadata to cluster search results on the fly. Icons are reminiscent of Windows, and results appear in traditional and familiar nested lists. Because the Vivísimo clusters are dynamic, they change as the underlying content changes.

Search engine technology has come a long way, but many employees are still hampered by old technology that returns poor results, writes CIO Update guest columnist Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivísimo.

If you're bewildered by endless lists of unorganized links to your search requests, give Clusty a shot. It's the brainchild of some brainy Carnegie Mellon University denizens who founded Pittsburgh-based Vivísimo Inc.

Goebel Group, Inc. a leading integrator of enterprise search technology products and services, today released the first comprehensive matrix detailing and comparing the features of the industry's search appliance products, available at www.goebelgroup.com/sam.htm. [...] The following products are included in this matrix: Google Mini, Google Search Appliance, Thunderstone Search Appliance, Vivísimo Velocity Dell bundle.

America Online Inc., the nation's largest Internet service provider, has licensed the software of a Squirrel Hill company as part of its effort to revamp the search engine on its Internet home page and attract more nonsubscribers.

America Online introduced a new Internet search engine yesterday, part of an effort to gain a larger share of the online advertising market. The service, called AOL Search, will sort results by geography and topic and offer a suggestion tool, the company, a Time Warner unit, said. AOL has licensed technology from Vivísimo, a closely held software company.

AOL is rolling out several enhancements to its core search functionality that position it as a clear contender in the battle for eyeballs between Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. [...] Search result pages also offer new features. Perhaps most noticeable is the addition of dynamic clustering using technology licensed from Vivísimo. Clusters are labeled "web matches" and appear on the upper left of search result pages.

Vivísimo who has positioned themselves as the clustering search engine, today announced plans for the expansion of its Pittsburgh headquarters in a new location and for the establishment of a Paris office to help support the growing worldwide demand for the company's award-winning products.

For the sorting and clustering of search results, the leader is Vivísimo, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff in Pittsburgh, with its new Clusty website.

Vivísimo's Clusty aims to sort through the confusing welter of Web results and cluster them by topic, speeding users on their way.

[...]The new Clusty metasearch engine from Vivísimo blasts your request to other sites based on what it knows about the strengths of individual search engines.