The best search engine yet

I have just discovered a search engine that beats them all: it is Vivísimo (a Spanish-type word, although it doesn’t appear in my Spanish-Spanish dictionary, which would mean something like "zesty"); its Internet address is http://vivisimo.com (note that it is not on "www").Earlier this year I discovered Webcrawler, which simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and several others (see my Don’t just Google–cast a wider net posting of March 5, 2006). In doing a search, one should not stick to any one engine because any of them will occasionally pick up something that the others won’t. However, I find Vivísimo the best single one.

Vivísimo’s beauty is its "clustering": it instantaneously lists the word or words sought into categories, with the quantity of items in each category. As a test, I typed in my own name (in quotation marks) and found the following:

My name (14)
Books (6)
Handbook for Professionals (3)
My name, London (2)
University (2)
Other Topics (3)

The 14 items in the first category included 8 references to a book that I wrote in 1993 and was published by Lloyd’s of London Press–5 of the 8 were listings by on-line booksellers offering the book and 2 listed the book as useful for study by those taking professional examinations in the insurance industry. Another listing, which I had never seen before, was by an on-line bookseller for another book which I co-authored in 1989.

The 14 also included 2 listings which were a big surprise to me: One a letter which I wrote in 2003 to the Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina student newspaper on the occasion of the death of Charlie Justice, a contemporary of mine at UNC and, in my opinion and also that of the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia, the greatest Carolina football player of all time. The second was a listing in a history of the University of North Carolina published during the 1890's of my grandfather (after whom I was named) as a member of the Dialectic Society, a debate society, during the 1850's. (I belonged to the same society during my student days there.) I had never run across those two items at any other search engine.

The other five categories referred to my 1993 book in one way or another.

Vivísimo did miss one or two references to me in other search engines, one a reference to a presentation I made during the annual "Saturday with Sherlock Holmes" that local Sherlockians put on at Baltimore’s Pratt Library. Still, I think Vivísimo is the best single search engine.

By omitting my middle initial, I came up with several references to my son (named after me) as a regional manager of the company he works for in California. I am particularly proud of his being cited as the top regional manager in sales in the U.S. and Canada in 2005.