You’d be thinking that when it comes to search engines there isn’t a lot more that can be done. I know there’s been these meta-search engines around which draw their results from all the major engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN and combine the results in one page. Personally I’ve never liked these enough to ditch my alltime favorite Google because there simply wasn’t any added value to the searches. When you compare results between Google and Yahoo for instance the top 10 searches are ussually identical, except maybe their sequence, but that ain’t a biggy.
So I didn’t expect anything new when someone (oi propan0!) forwarded me a link of a search engine called Clusty. Now Clusty is another one of those meta search engines, but as it’s name gives away does something that they call “clustering” with the search results.
It basically groups the search results in the so called search-clusters by topic, a bit like Flick search does as well. Topics for clusters are dynamical, which is neato, and so vary per search. The dynamic categories are pretty sensible at first glance as well, so the algorithm behind it doesn’t suck I guess.
By clicking one of the clusters you get all results for it which gives you interesting subresults you sometimes didn’t even think of searching yourself. It helps to refine your search without having to construct subqueries manually, and can help you to filter out thousands of results with only a few clicks.
Pretty neat innit?