What is the difference between Lexxe and Vivisimo in terms of clustering?
Clustering is by no means an easy job to do. That's why most search engines do not have clusters as part of their search results, let alone high quality clusters to offer to users. By the way, clustering on the fly is even harder and takes longer time for search results to be delivered, however, it saves a user's time to find the information (s)he really wants. And that's why it is something users like to use to narrow down their searches. Eventually, it saves time and whatsmore, efforts.
A lot of search engines use pre-organized clustered results as clustering methods. They are not "on the fly" clustering, so they are subject to many restrictions to off-line maintenance (including manual tuning) and updates. Their accuracy is not often as good either. So here we only compare Lexxe to Vivisimo, another search engine that offers on the fly clustering.
Firstly, although both Lexxe and Vivisimo search engines generate clusters on the fly, their approaches are quite different. Vivisimo employs an unspervised machine learning method for clustering, whereas Lexxe uses a linguistics-driven approach in determining the clusters in the texts. Lexxe still needs to clean up a bit.
Secondly, Vivisimo's general search ability still needs to improve, because if the search result is less relevant, the clusters will be off the target and become even more irrelevant. In this regard, we believe Lexxe is better than Vivisimo and we invite users to test it out.
Thirdly, another major difference between the two is Vivisimo's clusteres are hierarchically arranged. Lexxe does not offer hierarchical cluster results because of consideration on visual and space issues. Furthermore, some of the hierarchical arrangement may not make a lot of sense anyway.
Fourthly, when one asks a short question to Lexxe, the clusters will be more relevant to the question rather than the keywords in the query. Very often the clusters hold multiple answers to the question in addition to the main answer on the top of the page. Vivisimo does not answer questions, so their clusters are keywords-based only.
Finally, Lexxe's clusters is not restricted to 100-200 search results received from the original search, it is a new search each time you click on a cluster. We call it "Dynamic Clustering".
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