ResearchBuzz

Search engine Vivisimo has announced that its clustering search engine Clusty.com has gone mobile, now available for the tiny screen at http://m.clusty.com .

I called it up on my cell phone and ran a few searches. It’s actually a little ways down the results page before you get to search results. I ran a search for Fred and got clusters first, then a stock quote, then a Wikipedia article, then content from Snopes (!), then image and news results, THEN Web pages. (I knew they were in there somewhere!) At the very bottom of the page there were links to refine your search (in the case of my Fred search suggestions included Fred Rogers, Fred Frith, Uncle Fred, Fred Eaglesmith…)

Once you find something you want to click on, Clusty slims them down for mobile viewing on the fly. I’m not sure how this is being done, but a Snopes page was basically stripped of its ads and nav, showing just the content. (As a mobile search user, I like this. As a site owner, I don’t think I would like this done to my site.)

I have been dividing Web searching on my phone between Google and Ask. I don’t think I’ll use Clusty for simple fact searching, but if I need to know about an event or famous person, or perhaps (as in one incident a couple of weeks ago) a particular kind of tree, I’ll try it first.

On May 14, Ask announced Ask Mobile GPS, which it describes as a “GPS-enabled lifestyle application” (uh-huh) which hooks up Ask, Citysearch and Evite. I enthusiastically went to http://gps.ask.com to check it out.

There are some screen shots on the site, and they look great — search Citysearch from your phone, get walking and driving directions around town (with voice prompts) and even, if you’re into it, broadcast your location to folks in your contact list (Twitter gone frighteningly 3D).

The enormous downer unfortunately is that Ask Mobile GPS is available for a very limited number of phones — so limited I’m surprised it’s even been released. I consider my phone to be pretty good, and it wasn’t on Ask’s lists. I don’t get to try it.

Ask is taking a different tack from other search engines by actually offering this as a fee-based service — $9.99 for a two-week trial period. (Plans are in the works for a $2.99/mo version with less features.) It’s a refreshing change from search engines that offer everything for free, confident that advertising will cover it (maybe it will, but such thinking gives me 1999 flashbacks). I think they’ll need more phone models to make it work.

Hey, what’s up with the odd Yahoo Search Blog URLs? Well, no matter — I’m here to tell you about Yahoo’s new feature wherein they will send a page of search results to your mobile phone.

That is, if you’re searching for local information — regular old Web search apparently won’t cut it (which is too bad; sometimes I wouldn’t mind being able to do a quick Web search and then just send the information to my phone.) Anyway, do a search for local information with keywords and then some kind of location information, like paintball 90210. (When I tried searching for movies 90210, that apparently tripped another Yahoo Shortcut and it didn’t work.)

Anyway, when you do a search like that you’ll get a list of local destinations and then a link like Get results for “paintball 90210″ on your mobile phone. Click that link and you’ll get a popup window into which you put your cell phone number. You’ll get a text message with a link to the search results. Just a link, mind you. Not the actual results. I guess they’re trying to save people who might have to pay a lot for text messaging, but the option to get actual content would be nice…

Yahoo also has a regular mobile search, of course, if you want to browse from your phone. It’s at http://m.yahoo.com/.