Search Engine Journal

Clush Offers Option for Meaning-Based Search

It’s sorta clustering, but it looks more to me like the old “concept” or meaning-based searches for the late 90s, ala Oingo and Simpli. The engine is called Clush and the location is http://www.clush.com .

What color there is on the front page is red, ruining a perfectly good Orange Clush joke. Run a search and you’re presented with both a visual layout of possible other related search terms. For example, running a search for chips gives you a square with poker chips, fish chips, mod chips, potato chips, etc. Another square offers a roundup of chippish-terms: fragment, part, or thing. And underneath the query box is a final box with the single word scale.

It’s a good thing those suggestions are there because the actual Web results, located under this layout, are all over the map — Taquitos.net, genome chips, flintknappers, etc. To focus these results you choose one of the suggestions in the visual layout. I choose fish chips.

I got another page of results, with a single suggestion box containing entries like “pub restaurant” “take away” and “happy hour.” Unfortunately the first result on the Web listing is “Fish & Chips Letterboxing Paradise”. Huh? Drilling down into the suggestion box with “take away” did slightly better, but the second result on this list was for Welham Green, a village in England.

I like the clean layout of Clush. The suggestions were quite good. I like the screenshot previews of Web pages. But I found the relevancy of the actual Web results disappointing.

–

Columist Tara Calishain is writer and editor at ResearchBuzz and author of the new book Web Search Garage