In prepping for my meeting this week with Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez, I gave the company's Clusty consumer search engine a whirl (Clusty is a sort of carrot dangled to attract potential customers to the company's enterprise search and recovery technology).

First I popped Valdes-Perez's name into the search box, and received a list of hits on the right side of my screen, like you might see in any search engine: His bio from the Carnegie-Mellon University Web site, a Q&A with him from a search engine site and his profile on the Vivisimo site. On the left, I received a "clustering" of other links automatically categorized under headings such as "Scientific, Discovery," "President, Founder," and "Pittsburgh" (where the company resides). In other words, I could see a lot more about him on one screen than I could with a typical search.

(I had a less satisfying experience when I plugged my own name into the search box: up came entries on an Australian senator who made waves as the first openly homosexual member of Parliament and another on a car dealer in Iowa. Clustered on the left were headings such as "Runner," "Books," and "Photos." Nothing about me, though I don't hold this against Clusty. My parents get the blame on that one.)

Anyway, to make a short story long, when I met with Valdes-Perez it wasn't long before he sent me on a guilt trip for being satisfied with the "incomplete results" shown by Google and other search engines on the first page of a computer screen. He argued that searchers like me are typically exposed to just the really popular pages, but not necessarily the most useful ones, which are probably a few pages down on the search results. I couldn't deny it.

It's this idea of delivering the most useful or valuable results that this profitable and private company stresses with its enterprise Velocity search technology as well. The server-based technology is designed to crawl through applications, data sources and other search engines to gather results and categorize them, and this week Vivisimo announced improved connectivity between its offering and applications supporting open Web technologies such as RSS and Atom. Sometimes customers replace other search technologies with Velocity and sometimes they use it as an overlay, Valdes-Perez says.