In an office next to Frick Park in Pittsburgh, 10 people whose roots are in countries around the world work for Vivisimo, a Carnegie Mellon software spin off founded in June 2000 by two research computer scientists, Raul Valdes-Perez and Jerome Pesenti.

Vivisimo takes searches for material on the World Wide Web a step further than popular search engines like Google by clustering similar material in folders. For instance, a search for “Star Wars” creator George Lucas turns up 1,740,000 hits on Google, leaving it up to the individual to look through the links one at a time. The same search done at Vivisimo.com clusters the top sites into spontaneous categories, dividing the top 200 or so results into folders called Episode, Galaxies (a game), Star Wars Trilogy, Star Wars Kid, and other subjects.

“What excites us the most is two things,” says Valdes-Perez, now an adjunct professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department. “We’re dealing with a real human need, which is the frustration of dealing with too much information in the world. Secondly, we have a Web site that gets a lot of visitors from all over the world, and that’s very gratifying because you make a change or improvement, and you see it take effect the next day.”

Valdes-Perez was working in the field of knowledge discovery when he heard a talk in 1998 that made him reflect. "I thought I had some ideas for better answering the question, 'How can you easily make sense out of a hundred or two hundred search results just given one screen full of space? How can you absorb more information than just seeing 10 results at a time, and then hitting Next Page, and getting a new screen full?'"

He turned the project over to Pesenti, a postdoctoral mathematician from France who was also taking MBA courses at Carnegie Mellon. “He started running with it, vastly improving the ideas that I had.”

At the time Valdes-Perez wasn’t thinking of creating a company, but Pesenti pushed the idea. Carnegie Mellon released the technology they developed to them, and they started Vivisimo. They were joined immediately by Christopher Palmer, a computer science Ph.D. student, who re-wrote the original software in a more efficient programming language, making it run 100 times faster.

“There’s nothing like applying the energies of the inventors, who really have the passion for something,” Valdes-Perez says. The startup company got funding of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation and $500,000 from the State of Pennsylvania to get going.

Working from home at first, the founders sent email to their friends about what they were doing, and the word spread. The software demonstrated on the Web for free is licensed to organizations like Cisco Systems, Journal of the American Medical Association, and prominent Web search sites like Dogpile, Excite and MetaCrawler.

The business has garnered attention from newspapers, magazines and online media outlets from around the world, such as the Associated Press, CNN.com, New Scientist, Science, BBC World, CHIP and PC World magazines and The Wall Street Journal. The business has also grown with the addition of a number of graduates from Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department, Graduate School of Industrial Administration and the Language Technologies Institute. About 10 Carnegie Mellon undergrads and MBA students have worked part-time for the company.

“Anyone with an interest in human language and a degree in computer science is a good fit for our company,” Valdes-Perez says.