Clusty is not yet a verb like its behemoth competitor in the Internet search engine business. But two years after its debut, the innovative Web site and the Squirrel Hill company that created it are carving out a niche in the competitive world of finding cyber-info fast. "For a company with less than 50 people that does not advertise, I'd say we're doing very well," said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo, the creator of Clusty and its progressive search software. Clusty separates itself from Google and other search engines by organizing results into themed files of "clusters." To celebrate its second birthday this week, Clusty redesigned the site with new features, including the "Clusty Cloud," which bloggers and Web masters can personalize for use on individual pages. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., owns the majority of the Internet search traffic and is staking claim to a piece of real estate within miles of Vivisimo's headquarters. Google is building a local office on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Oakland and is recruiting workers. Yet Valdes-Perez and other tech analysts said Google's arrival is more likely to help local Internet firms like Vivisimo than put them out of business. Google's presence will "shine a brighter spotlight on Pittsburgh as a competitive, growing, high-technology region," said Dave Ruppersberger, president and CEO of the Technology Collaborative, an economic development organization. "There's no question that helps build credibility for Pittsburgh as a tech center," said Dennis Galletta, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz School of Business. From Vivisimo's open-space offices overlooking Murray and Forbes avenues, Valdes-Perez predicted this week that his company's programs and the clustering technology it's based on will continue to spread around the world. "Our plans are to have roughly 250 employees in three years," he said as a handful of employees plugged away at work stations straight out of Silicon Valley or Seattle. A recent visitor to the office was Saburo Kikuchi, president of Groupnet, a Tokyo-based company that is selling Vivisimo technology in Japan. This week, they launched a search site there devoted to buying and selling cars. Vivisimo also has scored some big contracts in the U.S. recently. It's clustering technology drives searches on FirstGov.gov, the federal government's award-winning Web site, as well as some of Rand Corp.'s and UPMC's Internet libraries. Vivisimo calls its products "search done right." While Google and other mainstream engines provide thousands of search results, users must sort through and open dozens of pages to find pertinent information. Clusty does the sorting for users, who need only click on a topic to go straight to those pages. "There's space for this in the market, and it appears Clusty is doing this better than other efforts," Galletta said. "My guess is Google will mimic this at some point." Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger said the company does not comment on competitor's products, and its decision to open an office here was based on Pittsburgh's "great talent, schools and lifestyle." Valdes-Perez, a CMU graduate and former professor there, also believes the Google move is more about the quality of students than getting closer to the competition. "My feeling is it was strictly to exploit the technical talent here, primarily the talent coming out of CMU," he said. "The student base has dropped off by 50 percent in the computer and math sciences, so companies will go where the graduates are, and that's here." Despite Google's big name, though, Valdes-Perez does not foresee any problems hiring the top whiz kids himself. "We don't really compete with Google" for employees, he said. "We're much more scrappy. There you will work on a small piece of a big product. The technical people we're looking for like to work with people, which is what we do." Additional Information:

Searching for the search

Here's where to find Clusty and Vivisimo's clustering search programs: Clusty.com FirstGov Rand Corp. Military Homefront City of Pittsburgh

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