Clusty becomes Yippy

You may recall Clusty - it's been around for years and it's a clustering engine - type in your term and not only get a bunch of results back, but clustered sets. Very useful if you're not sure of what you want, or you're searching a broad term and want to narrow things down a little. Well, Clusty is now no more - it's Yippy. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads up on this one by the way. My feeling is the same as Tara's - what the heck is a Yippy? (My first thought was a Bruce Willis line which I won't repeat here!)

Having spent a little time looking at the search engine, it's immediately gone right off my list of search engines to use. It's one of the few search engines that I've come across that actively promotes censorship. It states that it blocks:

1. Politically-oriented propaganda or agendas
2. Pornographic Material
3. Gambling content
4. Sexual products or sites that sell same
5. Anti-Semitic views or opinions
6. Anti-Christian views or opinions
7. Anti-Conservative views or opinions
8. Anti-Sovereign USA views or opinions
9. Sites deemed inappropriate for children

How's that for a list? Of course, I immediately went off to try a 'naughty word' search, and true enough - 'breasts' came up with a very small number of strange results that didn't have the term on the page, and I was told that the 'adult filter' was on - but there seemed no way of turning it off; at least not that I could find. This approach is just so stupid, as there are plenty of other terms that people could use to search for adult material which don't trip their filter. Found the same thing with their image and news function. Yippy completely ignored the search term - it didn't even return a 'no results, naughty person!' message - just 'please enter a query.'

I poked around a little further, and took a look at the 'privacy' option. How's this for a little gem: "So to all the good people of the greatest nation on God’s earth we say, "surf and search away, all the time and NO QUESTIONS ASKED. We trust you will love Yippy and all the services we offer. We are proud to be Americans; "One Nation Under God.""  I'm happy that they're pleased to be American, but this is really starting to send 'whoop whoop whoop whoop, Danger Will Robinson!' noises in my direction.

Looking even further into the Yippy (Ki-Yay, Mothe.. damn, almost got me!) site at Yippy itself it's basically trying to be a portal - offering email accounts, cloud storage, video conferencing, chat, weather reports and so on. The icons are painfully retro, but not in a good way, but which is in keeping with their general approach and ethos. Take a look:

So, thanks for all the good stuff Clusty - you'll be missed. As for this ... 'thing', I won't be coming back!

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Comments

[walt crawford]

As you can probably guess, there are a whole bunch of us born in the U.S. who probably wouldn't qualify as "Americans" in Yippy's worldview--or at least wouldn't care to. Thanks for the warning.

[Jon Schwartz]

Wow. Just like China.

[Heather]

Rats! Clusty was my go-to search engine. My students loved it. I certainly won't be teaching Yippy.

[Karen Blakeman]

It doesn't like chicken breasts recipe either. But breast implants is OK. I managed to sneak a few medical searches past the filter but they really ought to check the sponsored results - "increase your sex power in under 20 minutes" claimed one!

[Ed Chamberlain]

I always loved the concept of Clusty, and its a technology we see in libraries a lot. Several metasearch products out there use the underlying Vivisimo engine.

The whole thing appears to have morphed into an alternative Yahoo/Google for the conservative mid-west ...

[Scott Barr]

The filtered content will diminish this site greatly for my home use but at work I will still use the search feature. I have and will continue to have this site as the home page for my children. I believe in a world without Google and limit use of yahoo and never MS sites. Now I'm off to find a suitable replacement for Clusty.

[dialashop]

I used to use Clusty very often and it has some useful features. I always find it hard to adapt to change when you get used to something. Yippy is total different name, but I suppose I will get used to it. The new Yippy looks abit old school graphic-wise, but is colourful.

[Logus]

I'd never heard of Clusty before looking into Yippy. And I'd never heard of Yippy before until I saw an ad on wnd.com for it.

If it has very good search capabilities I'm all for it. We use an internet filter (purposeful censorship) and I've been quite leery of Google's dominance and business practices for quite some time.

Reading your review of the site encourages me all the more to use Yippy. Thanks for your negative views, for they were certainly positives for me.