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.

A nice thing about the ELUNA conference is the opportunity to share. During the Systems and Reporting session I attended, it seemed clear that there was enough of an interest in SQL to warrant an interest group, so I agreed to coordinate such a group. Basically, I think people just want a place to share. Luis at Ex Libris has started full-force with this idea by creating a portal to share information. Any Ex Libris customer can share SQL scripts and view other's scripts by creating an account. The portal is located HERE.

I'm excited about this. I think this site will be useful for technical folks for the scripts, but also for users so that they can get ideas of the kinds of reports that are possible with the system. It's clear to me that SQL is the way to go for reporting. Reports on the ARC product at ELUNA were less than encouraging. Lots of problems, slow response time on the data pulls, and many of the data fields just aren't available. It also seems like ARC would really need to be managed centrally to be even remotely useful. Meanwhile, here at PALNI, I think we've been pretty successful so far with automating SQL scripts through the services for basic reports, and its much more flexible.

Got back from ELUNA Wednesday night. First, let me just say that Knoxville is great. I probably would have never thought about visiting there without having a conference to attend. My wife, Pam, came with me and she was just as impressed as I was. Good restaurants. Nice parks. And we had fun going for walks along the riverfront. Thank goodness my wife did not make it to the outlet malls in Pigeon Forge, or my credit cards could have taken quite a hit!

I just wanted to throw up a few comments on ELUNA. I have no desire to provide a commentary on each session I went to - some of them weren't all that interesting. I'm sure other bloggers are doing this though (I know NeoArch blogged the conference too). ELUNA is a smaller conference (about 400 attendees). I think the group is beginning to mature somewhat. The accommodations and food at the conference this year was excellent, by the way, and the University of Tennessee deserves a big thanks for helping make it all happen.

Some highlights for me:

• Ex Libris, as a company, continues to see growth. They consider themselves one of the last three major ILS vendors standing, and intend to keep gaining customers. By far, the most interest right now is in their Primo product (which can run as a standalone product). A close second would be their Verde product. Electronic resource management is very hot right now.

Tom Keays has a really nice blog post with detailed goodness on how he wrote a Firefox plug-in to circumvent the search box for SFX.

Check it out here.