Lesson 11:  Clusty Search Engine

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As you learned in the lesson on metasearch engines, Clusty is a metasearcher, which means it is a site that brings back results from many different sources with one search request.  Clusty used to be part of the Vivisimo search engine that was developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.  Clusty works differently than other search engines because it "clusters" search results by topic.  (However, there is an option to view the results as regular "unclustered" lists) This allows the person searching to avoid the problem of sorting through a multitude of results that have nothing to do with each other.  Like many other metasearch engines, Clusty also offers users news, images, shopping, Wikipedia, blogs and jobs.  There is also an advanced searching option available.

Clusty searches in:

The features on the main page are the same as the features supported in the engines used in the search.  The links can be viewed in "full window," "frame," or "new window."

The advanced page can view results 100, 200 or 500 at a time.  There is an option to set a time out limit on searching.  The user can search by host, language and file type, and searches can also be filtered for offensive content.

My assignment for this lesson involved going to Clusty and searching for "WMD" and check out the clustered results listings.  Wow!  I love this site!  Once you run your search, you can click on either "clusters," "sources," or "sites." I highly recommend book marking this site and using it in your next search. 

Lesson 1 Search Engines   Lesson 2 Metasearch Engines   Lesson 3  Subdirectories   Lesson 4  Library Gateways  

Lesson 5  Evaluating WebPages   Lesson 6  Creating a Search Strategy   Lesson 7  Basic Search Tips  

Lesson 8  Boolean Logic   Lesson 9  Field Searching   Lesson 10  Troubleshooting Lesson 11  Clusty Search Engine 

     Chapter 12  All Things Google   Lesson 13  All Things Yahoo