Vivisimo

Vivísimo is dedicated to solving the information overload problem that occurs when users face thousands of results returned by a web or enterprise search engine by categorizing search results, making them far more meaningful, useful, and actionable.

The Vivísimo Clustering Engine is the core of Vivísimo's offerings for web and enterprise search.

For searching the web, Vivísimo offers Clusty.com, the first full-service search site powered completely by breakthrough clustering technology.

Your Name: Raul Valdes-Perez

Company Name: Vivisimo Inc.

Website URL: http://vivisimo.com

Your company / website vision statement / goal:

Vivisimo creates innovative software to access and cluster the world's information, for better search and discovery.

We help people become smarter by finding, discovering, and inter-relating online information much more effectively and comprehensively than has been possible with mainstream search technologies.

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

We sell enterprise software to industry segments in which search technology is important: web search engines & portals, corporate and government information systems, intelligence agencies, and the publishing industry.

We also created and operate a clustering web search engine Clusty.com which sorts search results into topic folders for easy overviewing, navigation, and discovery.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

Not at all. I spent most of my professional career as an engineering and later computer science student, then as a computer science researcher and faculty member.

I started a company out of Carnegie Mellon University because my co-founders Jerome Pesenti (now chief scientist, earlier a visiting postdoc) and Chris Palmer (now CTO, earlier a Ph.D. student) discovered an excellent way - clustering of search results - to cope with the overload of information you get on the web. We decided to start a company in order to change the online experience for the hundreds of millions of people who access search engines.

Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us more about yourself academically?

I have BS/MS degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, and a computer science PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Then I spent ten years doing research on new methods of Artificial Intelligence and their application as an aid to scientific cdiscovery in biology, chemistry, physics, and the social sciences.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

I attended a talk at Carnegie Mellon on a video-search project in the summer of 1998. Seeing ten search results shown on the screen, it bothered me that the speaker had to click "Next" in order to show us what was in the next ten results, and then Next after that, and so on.

It occurred to me that there had to be a better way to convey at once the contents of hundreds or thousands of items to users.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice when starting up a business, what would it be?

Get great partners whom you can trust.

Who are your role models / mentors and why?

My PhD advisor the late Herbert A. Simon. He was a world-class and century-class scientist, 1978 Nobel Laureate in Economics and 1975 winner of the Turing Award in computer science, among many other honors in other fields.

He had an unmatched knack for explaining complex issues in a simple way, he had great insights into just about any imaginable topic, he was an old-fashioned gentleman, and he always did what he said he was going to do.

Excluding yours, what company / website do you like / admire the most?

I admire Google for its tremendous technical and business-building achievements in crawling the world-wide web, ranking pages by a sensible criterion, and reliably delivering search results within a second. Now that those problems are solved, the world has new challenges to overcome, such as information overload, the invisibility of sites that don't get ranked in the top handful, and the over-centralization of information, which is where my company enters the picture. But Google's is an epoch-making achievement.

Want to read more? Buy the book now:

Buy direct for $24.95

Includes free shipping worldwide.

~~Normal price $34.95~~

Special price $24.95