Clustering

Several of the lower league search engines use a technique known as clustering to help users filter out the best results. This intelligently divides a morass of answers into categories, to help users weed out unwanted pages particularly useful if you get thousands of results on your keywords. Clusty (www.clusty.com) is still in beta testing mode, but combines Google like search functions with clustering options. A search for Guardian Online, for example, pro duced clusters including newspapers, politics, journalism, entertainment, books and angels. You can build categories based on either topic, source or URL, and the news and image searches seem fairly accurate, even if they sometimes return fewer results than you might need.Australian based Mooter (www.mooter.com) has a more visual approach, presenting clusters as a spider diagram, and shows a more traditional list when you click on your chosen category but by the time you get to the results, they seem much the same as other engines.Kartoo www.kartoo.com) takes the visual option further by drawing Flash maps of search results. While visually interesting, it can be cumbersome and seems to throw up a lot of commercial results.