Time sure flies. It was two years ago when Chris Sherman and Gary wrote their very positive review of the new Clusty (metasearch and dynamic clustering service from Vivisimo). It’s still a tool I use often and recommend.

To celebrate their 2nd bday two new features:

+ Clusty Labs
Several of these features have been mentioned on RS in the past. This page does a nice job of aggregating them on a single page.

+ Clusty Cloud Creator
This is new from labs. Think dynamic tag clouds. From the site:

A Clusty Cloud is a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. What makes the Clusty Cloud unique is that you can create a cloud based on any topic or query – you don’t need tags or months of content on a subject to create an interesting cloud.

Clusty Clouds are generated using our search results for the topic you enter. Since the tags you see come from Clusty, you can click on any of them to go to Clusty’s search results. Using Clusty to generate the cloud also ensures that it is always up-to-date because the clusters are generated in real-time.

It’s very simple to use.
1) Enter your search, select colors, width, and border
2) Preview
3) Grab code, copy, and then paste onto a web page.

Here’s a clusty cloud for the term Microsoft:

This is not only fun but also a great way to use what some might call Web 2.0 technology (tag clouds) and Clusty’s dynamic clusters as information discovery tools. In other words, quickly identify ideas and concepts you might not know about. Click any word or phrase to search.

See Also: We’ve Also Found the Job Search from Clusty (powered by Indeed.com) to be a useful way of not only finding job listings but also as an information discovery tool.

UPDATE: We’ve noticed you can also use advanced syntax with Clusty Clouds. Also, a new color scheme at Clusty.com today. Nice job.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 and is filed under Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.