FUDBusters: Google, Meet Clusty

FUDBust: Of all the technical advancements to emerge in the past several years, Google's is one of the most fragile. Computer scientists have been working on search technology for decades, so it's no surprise a start-up launched a new search engine last month that might be more useful than Google.

The new technology, called Clusty, was developed by Vivisimo, which has been working on Clusty's underlying technology for four years. Unlike Google, which returns a simple ranked set of results, Clusty provides search results in clustered categories, making it easier for users to spot what they need.

Clusty is not perfect. A recent search on "SIP phones" returned 163 results, with No. 8 about a quarterback in north Texas (he sipped coffee while on the phone). Still, the categorical groupings could make Web searching much easier for many surfers--including Google users.