Type of Engine: Visual and clustering.
Overall: Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…
Intro
Mooter is a visual clustering search engine and I like it. They’re from
UI and Features
You can click “All Results†to get the full list of results. Mooter maxes out at 120 results, or at least I didn’t find any queries that produced more than that.
If you don’t like the first cluster you see, click on the “Next Clusters†icon (the icon needs some improvement; it looks like a cluster of red pimples) to see another cluster.
Query Example
For phrase searches, each word usually becomes a cluster. For the search “William Styron†one of the clusters was “William.” Not good, but then I clicked on the cluster link and the sites were indeed about William Styron, and not just any old William. But still a “William” cluster doesn’t really help me.
Conclusion
Even if the name of a cluster doesn’t sound relevant, the links contained therein were generally on target. So I’d say they’re getting the back-end organization of clusters correct, but what they need to do is improve their cluster names and concepts. Maybe more phrase matching rather than pulling out just single terms, as if I know what I’m talking about.
They could also make the visual part of their results more compelling. As it is right now, it almost doesn’t need to be visual because the visual part of it doesn’t add much beyond novelty (and even the novelty is wearing off as more Kartoo-style visual engines appear).