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Monday, February 06, 2006 

A Search Engine That Doesn't Censor Its Results

Just rediscovered Clusty, a search engine which looks much more ready for serious usage than when it was first noticed by geeks and alike.

Interestingly enough (and I am not sure whether it has to do with Google's recent move to China), it has a very visible link on policy on censorship right on its homepage, which leads to a page with the following statement:
"Neither Clusty.com nor Vivisimo.com censors search results. That is, neither site removes from its output, in an ad-hoc manner, politically-oriented search results that would otherwise appear and that would be objectionable to governments or would be unlawful in unelected, non-democractic regimes."


So I guess it makes good business sense (distinct competitive advantage) not to censor when all other major players do.

I haven't tried searching any terms in Chinese yet. So I can't tell how good it is for Chinese search queries.

But having played with one of the vertical search engines operated by its parent, Vivisimo, I'd say the search engine looks promising.

Update: ESWN has compared search results from Clusty, Google and Yahoo based on a number of both politically sensitive and non-sensitive search queries, and concludes that Clusty's search performance doesn't is not necessarily better than Google or Yahoo. Would love to hear if anyone knows how Visimo's other vertical (aka industry-specific or knowledge domain specific) search engines fair compare to its competitions in the market.

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