SEL: Vivisimo Adds New ClusterMed Search Engine Tool for Medical Research

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Search marketing in the new media era.

March 31, 2004

Vivisimo Adds New ClusterMed Search Engine Tool for Medical Research

Vivisimo today announced the release of ClusterMed(TM), a powerful research tool that allows biomedical and life sciences researchers to search the MedLine database far more productively and efficiently.

ClusterMed(TM) organizes the long list of results returned by PubMed(R) into hierarchical folders allowing researchers to hone in on the most relevant results quickly. By organizing results into categories, users discover the main themes relating to the subject of the query and can easily reach relevant articles buried deep in the chronological list. In addition, similar articles are grouped together, rather than scattered throughout the results.

Vivisimo is certainly one of the smaller search engine companies trying to influence the future of search technology. We asked President & Co-founder, Raul Valdes-Perez to share his views on what to expect in the future, as search engines evolve.

[Andy Beal] Tell me about the Search Engine Technology being developed that excites you?

[Raul Valdes-Perez] Technology that partially automates the intelligent reasoning that goes on in users' heads AFTER they get search results. Such technology makes users more efficient. For example:

- Build a readable, one-paragraph profile of a certain person based on their web results.

- What are the non-obvious relationships between, say, Joe Blow and Otto Normalverbraucher? This expresses an information need that starts with two distinct input topics rather than just one.

- What are the major themes in these results? (Vivisimo does this)

[AB] What do you see being devloped in the coming years?

[RV] More machine intelligence built in to the search process that acknowledges what people do after they get search results and better acknowledgement of the information overload that users potentially suffer.

[AB] Do you foresee a time when commercial search results will be seperate from information search results?

[RV] On the web, it's hard to draw a good line between informational and commercial. I don't think this will happen. But the reasons for placement should be made explicit.

[AB] Do you think that search engines will start asking for personal information in order to provide better results?

[RV] This is doubtful, except for small improvements. People have fleeting interests when searching on the web. Their actions are not as unambiguous as is, say, purchasing a book on Amazon.com.

[AB] Do you think that the search engines are in danger of providing too many results?

[RV] The problem of information overload is actually handled pretty well by simply IGNORING most information, e.g., ignore everything after page 1 of the search results, or ignore most of the books in the library, etc. But this has a cost which we can call information overloook.

The challenge is not to eliminate information overlook, which isn't feasible, but to enable users to be more intelligent in the information they elect to ignore, and to let them see more during their time allotment of say, ten minutes, than they can now.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

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