The Future Of Search

I’ve finally found a web search engine that can give results that are much more useful than Google’s. This is Vivsimo, and its innovation that it can organize search results into useful categories on the fly. These clusters appear on the left-hand side of the search page in a tree that you can click on to expose deeper levels of the hierarchy. For work I have been doing lately a fair number of searches trying to catalog resources on California invasive species, so I know the useful resources on the web pretty well now. After playing around a bit with Vivsimo, I think its ability to categorize results (e.g. search on “yellow star thistle” and have it return a clustered set of results on yellow star thistle control) is going to be very handy.

For a quite an informative set of pieces on search technology, see Tim Bray’s blog here.