Some Cautionary Notes on Vivisimo

In a recent issue of Resourceshelf.com, I spotted a link to a Pittsburgh Business Times article on Vivisimo, a popular meta-search engine, and about profitability of the Vivisimo meta-search engine "test bed" which demonstrates Vivisimo's clustering technology. Profitability, they say? Time to take another look at Vivisimo's public meta search engine.

At the heart of Vivisimo's popularity is its excellent clustering technology, which is also used to facilitate targeted search in many other online products. Raves about Vivisimo's clustering has brought many users to its public meta-search site.

But a closer look at the underlying databases used by Vivisimo show it as a substandard meta-search tool for serious searchers. It's default web search databases (MSN, Lycos, Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory, and Overture) are generally agreed to be less-than-stellar choices in their respective categories. Overture and Looksmart are almost exclusively pay-for-placement products. Lycos is now principally Yahoo's Inktomi database with added sponsored links; the Open Directory is generally agreed to be an occasionally useful directory, but crowded with commercial content because of its preferential treatment in Google's algorithms. Wisenut is owned by Looksmart, and according to Search Engine Showdown, it has one of the smallest databases of all the spidered search engines.

Conclusion? No wonder Vivisimo is boasting of profitability -- most of its source database partners are pay-for players. According to the article, Vivisimo earns 35% of its revenue from paid placement and advertising on its public web site.

Vivisimo's story isn't really new -- many search engines (including Google and the original Altavista) have in the past used their public web search utilities as test beds to promote their technology, only to soon discover that there was more money in search than in selling the technology outright.

I like Vivisimo's clustering technology a lot. But it's important for serious searchers to understand that even great technology will produce poor results if the underlying databases aren't good. In Vivisimo's case, paid content in, (clustered) paid content out.