Clusty More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! Since Clusty is a metasearch engine, it may seem misplaced here among PPC tools, but it seems more suited to being called a tool than as being used as a place to decide to advertise on. Let me explain .... Clusty is a metasearch “clustering engine” from Vivisimo, which has a slightly different approach towards presenting search results than other search engines. Clusty is also, as far as PPC advertisers are concerned, an Ask.com partner solely, such that only ads placed with Ask.com will show up on Clusty at this time (August 2006). When a user enters a search term into Clusty, such as the very generic “shoes”, they are presented with results that can be further refined into specific topics listed along the left-hand side of the page, such as “Women’s Shoes”, “Wedding Shoes”, an interesting “Passengers, Remove their shoes” category, as well as many others. Sub-categories can also be displayed by clicking on the plus sign next to any category. Only two PPC sponsored ads are shown at the top of the first page of results, identified clearly as sponsored results, with the keywords relating to the result also indicated. Currently, all Clusty sponsored ads are drawn from Ask.com, even though the search results for this meta-search site themselves come from a number of search engines. One somewhat off-the-wall use for Clusty could be as a keyword research tool, by checking which sites and “clusters” come up for keywords you are considering using in a PPC campaign. The advantage of “clustering” results is pretty self-evident. It refines the list of results for a fairly general search term into the more specific areas of interest without the user having to resort to “search within results” or entering other keywords to narrow his or her search, should the first choice of keywords not bring up desired results. Granted, Clusty does not bring up every possible category or “cluster”, but it does break down the general results into the most popular and numerous categories. Plus, there is always the chance that something oddly interesting may be revealed in this thematic clustering, such as the “Passengers, Remove their shoes” theme with a search for “shoes”. The advantage with Clusty is that results concerning airline passengers and their shoes will not be displayed intermingled with other search results concerning shoes. Clusty does some of the thinking for the searcher, by grouping together results with a similar theme within the larger category of the original search term. Clusty has a simple design, very reminiscent of Google, with tabs across the top for search by “Web+”, news, images, shopping, blogs, job, Wikipedia entries, and a customizable tab with choices of different news sites, shopping sites and other search engines (currently Ask, MSN, Gigablast, Looksmart, Wisenut and Open Directory). In addition to clustering by topic, results can also be clustered by sources (Ask, Gigablast, MSN, or all Sponsored Listings) or by URL suffix (.com, .org, etc.). A simple toolbar is available for download, which offers a popup blocker and an option to highlight your search terms on the results page, as well as the ability to simultaneously search a number of leading search engines. Users seeking privacy like Clusty because it does not track user data past the first search, so information about an individual’s search pattern doesn’t extend past the first search box entry. Genealogists in particular find it a good tool. The connection with Ask.com for sponsored results proving beneficial as Ask becomes more of a threat to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Unfortunate choice of name, that has a lot of negative or nasty implications, one of the most common one being its rhyming with the name of a clown of ill-repute in "The Simpsons". |
