Hank [BS/MSEE,
MSM $$$, Ph.D. Mgmt] teaches Odds & Ends Tuesday
Suggest ENTR200K readers look @ the comments on last Friday & Saturday’s blog entries; Donna made comments. She informed me in a private email that she has contacted www.zentation.com about becoming part of their video input choice, along with video.google.
The “boomer” computer system I recently purchased from an eBay dealer arrived Thursday. Several of the plastic interior air diffusion shrouds inside the box were unseated during shipment - took a while to figure out how they were installed. Next, it has two DVI outputs to run two monitors at the same time - I’m sure you’ve seen this dual-monitor setups in offices @ Purdue. Well, the computer fans lit off when the power was turned on, but no video - great 
After scratching my head and sleeping on it, I switched to the 26″ monitor which is also setup with DVI, and everything worked great. The computer came with two 36 Gig SCSI drives, which in RAID 0 (remember I talked about RAID) would provide a 72 Gig drive. Video files tend to by very large, so I decided to do the following: add four more 36 Gig drives ($40 each), and a 500 Gig IDE drive ($150), for a total of 7 hard drives. All of the 36ers will be in RAID 0, giving a “Drive C” of 6X36=216GB, and a “D drive” of 500 Gigs. I will be using Windows XP Pro as the operating system since it takes up lots less resources than Vista. I’ll let you know tomorrow “how it goes.”
Nwokedi informed me of a “new” search engine that is in direct competition with Google named www.clusty.com. Nwokedi stated
"...it appears to be (a)clean search engine. It displays the results as
you would see in Google, but it also clusters the results into groups on
the left hand side of the screen which is very useful. I was told by an
expert in Artificial Intelligence (she's a part of Discovery Park but
resides in the CS building) that clusty's search lgorithms are comparable
if not better than google's search algorithms."
I did a search on Porsche racing, and using Clusty’s “cloud” capability, produced the graphic which follows (Please try clusty and report on how you found it to be in comments to this post……….):
Loading Clusty Cloud …
The http://www.clusty.com really does seem helpful when searching for things. I tested it myself and found it to be very useful when searching for typical information, rather than going through lists and lists of sites, it was nice to click on the groupings which were more relevant to want I was looking for. I found the search engine to be very user-friendly and also I had doubt that it would work for foreign languages; being a new search engine, but it worked well with foreign languages too (I tested it for Korean).
I like Clusty, even though the name is far harder to say that Google. I like the clustering idea and it does make searching faster. I “clustied” my hometown and the first thing that popped up was the weather forecast (check it out at http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v:sources=webplus&query=Belleville, IL ) I think that is a cool feature. Google shows a Google map for my hometown as their top item, but the weather is more helpful, IMO. Thanks, Nwokedi, for the new site!
The actual link is: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v:sources=webplus&query=Belleville, Illinois
The link in my above comment didn’t work corrrectly.
I’m not sure how I feel about clusty. I sort of like the groupings off to the side but I still think that Google is a lot easier to use and I agree with Rebecca that Google is easier to say. Maybe I just fear change but for now I am definitely going to stick with what I have used for a long time now, Google.
I don’t think I like this Clusty very much. I searched for Purdue, and the clustering feature just didn’t do much for me. There was nothing on here that I couldn’t have found easily by just typing one or two extra words in a Google search. I also searched for myself, and the “Project, ENGL 421s” cluster had only 3 out 5 links matched accurately to me, which I think isn’t so hot, since there’s probably only about ten other people in the country with the same name as me, and I’m pretty sure none of them took Technical Writing last fall semester. I’m not impressed.
I also like the groupings, but it is going to be a hard/impossible to overthrow google. Google is also expanding like crazy, not to their search engine but as a website in general. I believe they recently are working on something called google streets, which will be similar to google earth but clearly of streets. Google is an impenetrable force, and I for one wouldn’t like to compete with them.
It seems to be just about everything that Google offers plus the side groupings. I don’t know how practical the side clusters are as of now but I am sure there is room for development.
Ten-to-one, Google is going to look and see the clusters that http://www.clusty.com offers and incorporate that into their website and improve. Like John said, Google expanding like crazy; they have even hired people I know that specialize in animation (makes me wonder…) Google is a giant, and has a multitude of employees. I assume that they are looking to evolve the search engine to incorporate newer ideas. Like IE taking Firefox’s tabbing system, Google will most likely start to “cluster” more efficiently, leaving the competition in the dust.
I like Clusty, so I expect it will gain some market share, but it isn’t 10x better than Google. Most people will stick with Google until Clusty adds more features that aren’t available from Google. Right now, the biggest drawback with Clusty is it is slow. Maybe that is just my connection right now, but a slow site will die a quick death. Actually, the main page and searches are very fast. Only the other tabs above the search bar such as government, shopping, and jobs are painstakingly slow.
So clustering results is useful primarily when you’re trying to do a lot of research on some topic. If you’re trying to do a quick and dirty search, you really won’t care for or need clustering.
So the idea is that if you’re trying to find out a lot of information on some topic, you’re probably going to want the information to be organized some way (in clusters) to make your manual job of going through numerous links to get information more efficient.
When a company gets to the size of Google, the only way you can fight them is to convince the world that they are the “bad guys” (what essentially Google has done to Microsoft–and Microsoft sort of did to itself).
I liked the way clusty.com was set up. I liked the links on the left that narrowed the search. However, I don’t think I’ll start using lusty instead of Google. I don’t think Clusty returned as many websites. Also if you were to click on the tab at the top “images†you get hardly any compared to the images you’ll get when you use Google, at least with the searches I tried. I think for Clusty to become more popular they will have to do something to set them apart from Google, going above and beyond what Google offers.
I think clusty is underpowered compared to google. Google has way more money and will never be beat, well as of right now. I liked the way clusty was organized, easy to use, etc but I will never “sell out” on google!
I checked out clusty.com indepthly. It appears as a solid and legit search engine. However,
just like I stick with the same brands, Im loyal to the same search engine. I really have grown
accustomed to the efficiency of Google. I will use clusty.com as a supplementary search engine when
conducting extensive research. Nwokedi, I appreciate your input!!!! Hank, from reading these blog
posts, I have consistently noticed the incorporation of Porsche. Just tell me what color
exterior/interior you desire. My future success as an entrepreneur is attributed to you
and your class. True Talk