Yippy

» see yippy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

this part i was on the edge of, mostly. clusty was the third-place search engine i heard about in tech blogs and mostly did not use. the metasearch and clustering angle was the sales pitch. google already worked. by 2005 nobody outside of pittsburgh or a handful of university librarians was switching their default because they wanted results grouped by topic on a left rail.

vivisimo built the underlying tech out of a carnegie mellon research lab. the company launched clusty as a consumer front in october 2004 to show off what the engine could do. you typed a query and got the normal ten-blue-links on the right. on the left you got a folder tree, each branch labeled with a topic clustered from the results. related topics stacked as sub-folders you could open.

i clicked on it a couple of times to see how it worked. the interesting bit was watching the tree change shape as you refined the query. the boring bit was that google's results were still better most of the time and one click on the right list was already fast enough. anyway, the folder rail was a solution people did not know they wanted, because they did not want it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the clustering pitch ~

metasearch engines were a real category once. back then. dogpile pulled from multiple sources at once and hotbot did its own variant. clusty added the topic-tree layout on top and made it look like a proper research tool. for university librarians and anyone who needed to survey a topic instead of find one answer, the folder view was actually useful.

that story was never mainstream enough to hold traffic against google. by 2010 clusty was still around but tiny. yippy inc bought it in may 2010 for 5.55 million dollars and put the yippy name on the front. the measured peak traffic that year sat around 100,000 monthly unique visitors, which is a small town rather than a search engine.

~ the corporate afterlife ~

ibm bought the vivisimo enterprise engine in 2012 and rolled it into what became watson explorer. that was where the real value in the technology ended up. the consumer clusty and yippy front sat separately, running on smaller and smaller share of the market.

by 2019 the yippy ceo was pitching it as a fair-results alternative to google, powered by watson under the hood. the marketing did not land. in late april 2021 the site started redirecting to duckduckgo, and the yippy inc corporate registration was revoked by the georgia secretary of state in august the same year. the folder tree closed for good.

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