Given that Google has gobbled the search world (remember HotBot?), how can an upstart get any attention at all for its innovative approach to search? That’s the challenge facing Vivisimo Inc., which just released a beta of a new search engine called Clusty.

Hmm. Well, maybe if a few blogs mention it…

My favorite search engine used to be Northern Light, which nobody ever heard of. It was terrific, placing results in subject-matter-labeled folders rather than making you sift through the typical endless scrolling lists of results. If you entered the search term “pizza,” you got a folder for pizza parlors, another one for recipes, and so on. Clusty (so named because of its clustered results) does the same thing, but carries the concept one step further. IN addition to the categorization on the left-hand side of the page, it also organizes results under tabs along the top of the page—Web results (the default view) news, images, shopping, encycloped, and gossip. In addition, you can customize your tabs to add eBay, Slashdot…and blogs. (You can also remove any of the default tabs except Web and News.) You can even create your own tabs, linking them to specialized search engines of your own choice.

With Google, if you want news results from a search, you have to visit news.google.com. With Clusty, just click the News tab; the results are waiting for you.

Just for giggles, I entered “public relations.” The categories I got were Advertising, PR and Marketing, PR firms, University, High-Tech, Corporate, Jobs, PRSA, and more. The left-hand categories change when you select a different tab.

The idea of clusters is a great one, addressing the complications of long lists of results. If enough people see Clusty, they could end up switching. After all, as Bill Gates has often noted when confronted with the notion that Microsoft stifles competition, any high-tech company is one innovation away from obsolesence. There’s great hubris in any assumption at Google that nobody can do better. But you have to wonder how much PR and marketing savvy a small company in Pittsburgh, PA has in an effort to topple the Google Goliath.

So here’s my effort to put blogs into play as a community-driven PR effort. Give Clusty a try. You might never Google again.