TOOLS

VIVÍSIMO

The name means superlatively lively, bright and clever. Not sure if the inventors, from Carnegie Mellon, are referring to themselves or the product, but I like the name and the tool. It's pretty neat! It's not a search engine, it's a results organizer. It takes the results of searches by one or a combination of search engines and, using the Web page title, URL and short description, finds commonalities to "cluster" documents into folders. The technology uses algorithms . . . and like Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that! Read the FAQs for yourself.

Vivísimo can save you some time when you are searching for information about a broad topic or person or company who is in the news quite a bit. You can do a simple or customized search. The customized search allows you to select whether you want an exact phrase, some combination of words or to use Boolean logic; limit the number of results; and select all, one or some combination of eight search engines. After your search, the screen splits in three, with the search term at the top, the results folders at the lower left and the open folder's contents on the lower right. You can even click and drag the dividing line between the right and left frames to help you read the results.

Since I was trying to clean up old records in our database, I thought I would see what I could find on GTE and Bell Atlantic. I put in the two company names and got right to the info I needed about the merger that created Verizon. I like that kind of service. So, I thought I'd play some more.

I tried the simple search with just the name, and then the customized search, with the name as a phrase, on the ever popular Phil Knight. With the simple search, I lucked out. Among the numerous folders, I got some really helpfully titled folders, one called profile and one called almanac biography, that had stuff which could help me get me started on a Knight bio. I also got a folder with the whimsical title of Bob, which had Phil and various Bobs mentioned in the Web sites it contained. Not as useful. I tried a search on another prospect and got a nice folder full of genealogy sites only. Unfortunately, none of them related to my prospect.

Then I tried the customized search. The folder labels were not as enticing. I tried several other searches to see if this was a consistent issue. It wasn't. Sometimes the simple search had more helpful folder labels and sometimes the customized search yielded more descriptive results. It appears that using both the simple and customized search techniques in combination is the most fruitful approach to finding useful clusters of data sites.

Just a note of caution. The phrase search does not seem to function like an exact phrase search. I got several variations on a theme in my results.

I think this tool warrants testing by all and sundry. Knock yourselves out.

http://vivisimo.com/

Chris Mildner