I'll admit I had not heard about Clusty until yesterday. Of all places, I saw it mentioned in a copy of 2600 while shopping at Borders yesterday. Clusty is a clustering search engine, and its results supposedly rival those of Google's. Yes, that's right, Google is not the only search engine around. In fact, I've heard lots about Ask.com producing better results than Google, and certainly their maps are better. But not doubt, Google dominates.

But Clusty is more than just a cool search engine. The reason Ex Libris users should know about Clusty is that Clusty is powered by Vivisimo. Where have you heard Vivisimo before? Ex Libris just made a deal with Vivisimo to use their clustering search engine in Metalib. So if you jump over to Clusty, you'll be getting a sneak preview of the search technology behind the future search mechanism in Metalib.

And on top of that, the clustering capability looks pretty cool. I haven't played with too many of the features beyond the web search, but it does seem to do a nice job of breaking topics into general categories.