During one of the latest lessons of the Information Retrieval and Machine Learning course I’m attending, I had the chance to get to know some clustering techniques and algorithms, and an example of “real world” application a clustered (meta) search engine was presented too: Vivìsimo.
“They used a mathematical algorithm and deep linguistic knowledge to find relationships between search terms and bring them to light.”
I’m always amazed by natural language based techniques; results are quite accurate if you think about the huge amount of unstructured data the search process insists on.
Vivìsimo Inc. provides enterprises and government with tailored clustered search solutions and also provides a consumer-oriented web search service: Clusty.
One thing I like a lot is the Clusty cloud creator: a totally unsupervised – real time – tag cloud generator, based upon – I suppose – latent semantic analysys techniques. Is it a first step towards an automated semantic tagging? Hope so…I’m quite fed up with thinking about tags myself, and I keep forgetting quite relevant tags too 
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- Vivìsimo search results for query “U2″:
- Clusty cloud for query “U2″:
[...] I have heard about Vivísimo and Clusty during a university lesson about Information Retrieval and Machine Learning. [...]