Clusty for Wii

Clusty is one of the most unique, if not the best, search engines available. More stylish than Google, and more simplistic than Ask, Clusty is the first truly new search technology I have seen since Google was created. You’ll have to try it for yourself to see just how good the search engine is, but Vivisimo, the company behind Clusty, does have something to say on its behalf:

Clusty is a whole new way to search the web.

Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This “metasearch” approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.

But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.

And with a name like Clusty, it’s gotta be good!

The great news is that Clusty has a streamlined, optimized version (which can be found at http://wii.clusty.com) designed specifically for the Nintendo Wii’s Internet Channel. This sleek simplification of a great concept features a Wii-style interface, coupled with some fancy AJAX mouseovers and categories of results along the left (see attached screenshot).

So far, most of the websites optimized for the Internet Channel have been gaming websites, so it is good to see non-gaming websites step up and become Wii-friendly. Hopefully the majority of the internet will follow suit, but it is not likely.