Pity poor Google. With its deep pockets, it is beginning to resemble the New York Yankees - everyone acknowledges its success, but many relish the thought of it being knocked off its pedestal. The latest challenger is Vivisimo, which this week launched a new Web search engine, Clusty.com. The name comes from its primary differentiating feature, the ability to take hundreds of search results and dynamically sort them into clusters of related documents. Some Outsell observations:
- This is a direct assault on one of Google's weaknesses. Its search algorithm is extremely weak for organized or targeted searching and provides the very opposite of in-context information. It ranks highly the content that is most "linked-to" - a popularity test. While that works fine as a search engine for the mass market, it's not much good for complex topical searches that return a wide variety of documents with no context. Google's indexing of STM journals, for example, doesn't result in their ever showing up near the top of the search results because only a narrow slice of people need them.
- And if that's not bad enough, a Google search result is a hopelessly inefficient, user-unfriendly list of entries, with one-dimensional ranking. And it's a dimension that can be rigged; search engine optimization specialists point out that the person who breaks a news event is at a disadvantage to the thousands of "me-toos" who pick it up and re-publish it, making Last In, First Listed the rule all too often.
- In a perverse "revenge of the nerds" story, where here the nerds are companies who've studied search the old-fashioned way, Google is being attacked by "old theories" of how content in context should work. Clusty isn't a new concept; classification and clustering information search has always been an effective way of dealing with large volumes of information. Nor is doing it on the fly a new idea; Northern Light was doing similar things eight years ago.
- Vivisimo was doing just fine chugging along without Clusty - profitable and growing in an enterprise search niche. The splash it's making in search shows how important it is to appear to be the next Google - there's much more pizzazz in taking on a giant than in being a small, profitable company. And it also shows how Google is at risk with everyone gunning for it.
- The bottom line here is that Clusty will introduce clustering to the masses and will likely lead to pull-through sales for enterprise products, both Vivisimo's and other competitors'.
Google has become synonymous with search in its meteoric rise, but expect it to lose a little altitude as challengers with different approaches take their places at the search table.
