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Private company

Vivisimo

American internet technology company

Vivisimo was a privately held technology company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, specialising in the development of computer search engines. The company was acquired by IBM in May 2012 and is now branded as IBM Watson Explorer, a product of the IBM Watson Group. Vivisimo's public web search engine Clusty was a metasearch engine with document clustering; it was sold to Yippy, Inc. in 2010.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

Jun 21, 2000Founded1

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Vivisimo was a privately held technology company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, specialising in the development of computer search engines. The company was acquired by IBM in May 2012 and is now branded as IBM Watson Explorer, a product of the IBM Watson Group. Vivisimo's public web search engine Clusty was a metasearch engine with document clustering; it was sold to Yippy, Inc. in 2010.2

The story

Vivisimo was founded in 2000 by three computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon University: Chris Palmer, Jerome Pesenti, and Raul Valdes-Perez. The name was taken from the Spanish superlative adjective vivísimo meaning "very lively" or "very clever."

In October 2008, Vivisimo was awarded the contract to power the search portion of FirstGov.gov (now called USA.gov), the official web portal of the United States federal government.

In 2012, IBM acquired Vivisimo to boost its Big Data Analytics capabilities.

From Wikipedia’s article on Vivisimo, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Products and brands

Velocity was sold as an installed or hosted application to enterprises, governments, and OEMs. With Vivisimo providing additional professional services.

Velocity's social search features allowed users to contribute to organizational content by tagging, voting, annotating and sharing search results. The contributions are instantly indexed in new searches.

From Wikipedia’s article on Vivisimo, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Timeline

  1. Jun 21, 2000Founded Founded1

Sources

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