Vivisimo Says So Long To Clusty as Florida's Yippy Acquires the Technology To Power Their Search Resource
Today, it was reported that Vivisimo has sold Clusty to a Florida company named Yippy for $5.6 million The Yippy site already says powered by Clusty and if you run a Yippy search except for the bars at the top and bottom of the page, the results page looks exactly like what Clusty.com provided. We will try to find out in the AM if this is just for a certain amount of time or a permanent thing.
Yippy, which provides a “family-friendly” Internet environment offers a closed system that, through its browser, excludes millions of domains and ISPs that parents wouldn’t want children to see, said Richard Granville, CEO of Yippy. The company intends to use Clusty as its search engine. Previously, the company was using Clusty but without ownership over the engine, it could not control the search aspect, he said, so it made sense to buy it.
We are still a bit unclear about precisely what Yippy paid for. The domain? They have one already. The search code which includes the clustering and the "under the hood technology" that separates it from the clustering technology and solutions Vivisimo sells to enterprise search customers? Remember, Clusty did not crawl the web but targeted specific search engines so we would imagine crawler technology was not involved. Whatever the case, we will try to clear it up tomorrow am on the east coast.
A Few Graphs to Reminisce
It will be six years this September when Chris Sherman (now at Search Engine Land and Gary (still at ResourceShelf (-;) wrote this positive review about Clusty the day it became available. Clusty's dynamic "on-the-fly" clusters allows you to quickly see/confirm what you know but additionally illustrate what you do not know and/or confirm or not confirm ideas or facts your unsure of by reviewing the clusters.
The article included this quote from the CEO:
"You're seeing a rich complex mixture of selective crawling of sites, with meta searching of sites and clustering," said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo.
So, the service was not only useful (for many) but also a great way for Vivisimo to get their name out their and not only say we do a, b, and c but actually show people a real-time practical demo that they ccould use once the sales call was over and also share with friends and family.
And by no means were Chris and Gary alone in bringing attention to Clusty. Between the media attention posted on this page and with even more on this page of 2005 press Clusty continued its attempt to break through to the masses. It won a bunch of awards from the 2005 Search Engine Watch Awards when Danny Sullivan (now at Search Engine Land) was the person in charge at SEW and also received a "Best of the Web" Award from Forbes in 2005
But, is often the case in technology, the first in a space and/or useful/different/exciting/innovative as judged by those who follow industry doesn't mean all that much if it can't reach it's intended audience.
However during the time the Google name was quickly in the process of becoming a verb and also becoming the juggernaut in terms of the business it is today.
So take all of the Google mojo and then try to get users to look, try, understand, and switch is not an easy task.
Finally, we will also try to find out if ClusterMed (dynamically cluster Pubmed content, powered by Vivisimo) and BioMeta Cluster will remain available to the general public.
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