Life beyond Google: the Clusty challenge

I met this week with the head of Vivisimo, a company that specializes in enterprise search but that also has a consumer search system called Clusty. The twist with Vivisimo’s technology is that it presents on one page your typical set of search results, plus a clustered categorization of other results that would typically be found on another page — a page you in all likelihood wouldn’t bother to visit.

The technology behind Vivisimo got its start at Carnegie-Mellon University, where Raul Valdes-Perez and other researchers came up with the idea before leaving to start the company in 2000. Valdes-Perez says that at the time his team left to form Vivisimo CMU didn’t have much of a system for commercializing such efforts and said that his team’s request for CMU to release the technology to it was somewhat unusual. Not to say that some pretty interesting technologies and companies haven’t spun out of CMU over the years, with FORE Systems and Lycos being among them.  Read more about Vivisimo here.

Bob Brown, bbrown@nww.com