Andrew,

What a great pick-me-up after a long week to read your take on our site. I’m glad you like it and I’m flattered you chose us as one of the sites you review. I understand your suggestions, and will take a look at those elements with a fresh eye. We’re continuing to improve the site as each day passes, so please stop by again in the future. Thanks again for the vote of confidence. If you ever want to consider making that virtual investment a real one, let me know. Your bio would suggest you’d be a great person to have giving us additional counsel. All the best!

Doug Worple
++

Doug

Thanks for your comment…I have just about resurfaced from banging my head on the desk after seeing 3Luxe…it was one of those moments that happens all too often ~ ‘Why didn’t I think of a highly demographically segmented product search engine?”.  I mean really!  It’s so obvious when you think about it.  So come on folks, before 3Luxe – who can really lay claim to creating a product search engine that specifically and tightly targeted a specific demographic of consumer?  And No, tech geek is not a demographic before folks start jumping up and down about CNet and that ilk.

Again, good luck to 3Luxe! Stay in touch and let me know if there is any way at all I or the Advisor Garage site can support you as you take the discriminating consumer market by storm!

Andrew

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3Luxe.com is a product search engine with a difference…other search engines use algorithms, numbers and fractions as the cogs and wheels to regurgitate a whole string of very near misses to everyone that plugs in a search phrase. 3Luxe uses no algorithms or numbers…it more relies on the taste and interpretive skills of its founder and pooled review site results to determine the top 3 products currently available.

Like Flash floor cleaner and hundreds of P&G commercials, draw a line down the middle of your computer screen and compare and contrast – on one side you have a big complicated machine delivering a homogenized gloop of product results to anyone that asks and on the other side of the screen, the three best products in any given category according to the 3Luxe founders.

Business Model:

• Advertising from key manufacturers who are ultimately lucky enough to have their product/s in one of the top three results
• Affiliate links with Amazon or Shopzilla et al when people take the next step after the search and review and treacle forward towards purchase
• Google ads (ugh!)

Some Core Functionality/Elements:

• Um…Search!
• 3 Results only of perhaps the most expensive but kick butt products you can find in any given category
• Thumbs up or thumbs down vote for any of the items returned
• A very cool drop down of review results from cnet and others, along with consumer reviews from other sites
• Bookmarking
• Send to friend
• Comment posting for all items

Likes:
Like, Like, Like.  This site is well built, thoughtful, intuitive and not surprising the Worple Brothers have got it right…I say not surprising because Doug Worple, the CEO is another former proctoid that went on to create what looks to be a very cool creative / advertising agency called Barefoot.  Like it or not, the great advertising agencies are helping to shape the tastes and desires of us all…so it is not a shock that by combining their own tastes for items with consumer reviews from multiple sites they are delivering product results that actually seem to be the best 3 luxury items.  I guess my original concern was “What makes these guys able to choose the best three items that I’m going to like?” – but in a sense, better to combine the science of review sites such as cnet with some degree of taste than relying upon the Google number crunchers. This business model opens up a number of now obvious business opportunities i.e. segmented product search engines according to demographics – so now we have the ‘A’ search engine, anyone up for creating the ‘B1′ product search engine?

Dislikes/Suggestions:

• The home page has more of a ‘website’ than a search engine feel.  You could argue that this is so different that going for the minimalist search format is wrong – but the current look and feel of the home page is almost of a templated website.
• Taking a note from P&G brand training – too many fonts, and no clear obvious focus for the eye causes confusion in terms of what are the priorities on the page.  We have caps competing with flowing scripts with more modern fonts, moving photos and all in all its a great concept which, from a design perspective, needs some tweaks.

My Virtual Investment:
With my virtual $1M, I would consider it a luxury if I were able to make a $500K virtual investment in 3Luxe. Good luck Guys!

http://www.3Luxe.com

Interested in other articles about Its Our Movie?

• http://www.coolbusinessideas.com/archives/consumers_seach_engine.html

Andrew

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Quintura just responded to yesterday’s post “Quintura: A $Zero Virtual Investent”.

” Yakov Mar 2nd, 2007 at 1:54 am Edit

Hello Andrew! Very interesting post as well as the other reviews! Don’t you know that Quintura stands for quintessence or pure essence of searching. Try to make Quintura your homepage for a week and then give us your views!”

Yakov, I did not understand that this is the definition of Quintura, when I searched through the dictionary it had no definitions for Quintura.

As I reconsidered my review, I wondered if I had been too harsh with the zero virtual investment especially as this is a beta site at this point.  Seeing today’s functionality, even with the ‘invite a friend’ element which could drive adoption, I would still not put my virtual cash in Quintura but I could be wrong. I will go back often and see how the functionality and the company develops.  It would be great if Quintura becomes the next hot company with significant revenues…but I just don’t see it today.

Have your say here: http://www.andrewive.com/mdsg-forum/

Andrew
Founder
http://www.AdvisorGarage.com

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Quintura is a new search engine that has chosen a tag cloud metaphor as the means of search.

 

Business Model:
This is a beta site launched in the last few days so its not too surprising that there are not too many obvious ways of generating revenue for Quintura.  There are a number of tabs beneath your search terms…web, image, video and AMAZON. So if your interested in finding out how your search for a particular subject parleys into a related Amazon product, click away.  So far…that seems to be Quintura’s business model.

Some Core Functionality:

• Type in your search term, hit enter and *poof* you have a tag cloud in half the page to navigate
• Your cursor hovers over one of the words and *poof poof* sub clouds of words appear
• The words seem more or less bold…perhaps that means something? I know, perhaps each words estimated relivance to the original search term.
• The second half of the screen is left for actual search engine standard format responses or images or video or Amazon goodies.  Yum!

Likes:
Quintara are courageous to try a different way of delivering search engine results and navigating through those results. 

One thing I particularly like is if you consider ‘ordinary’ search engines, most users have a limited attention span and expect the best results to be served up in the first few paragraphs.  If what they are looking for is on page 2…tough… it will probably never be found except by a few tenacious searchers.  We live in a ’give it to me now’ society after all!  Quintura allows some of those ‘deeper down’ results to be captured within the visual snapshot circulating the search term. It could be better for the searcher and for the information being searched if they can visibly see results that ordinarily appear on the bottom of page 1 or ugh…perhaps even page 2. 

Dislikes:
So in the ‘likes’ section I mentioned a searcher being able to see results ‘circulating’ the search term and perhaps see results more easily that would have been missed in the results from ordinary search engines. True. 

But because of the tag cloud metaphor combined with appearing and disappearing sub words, its somehow challenging to really understand what you are seeing from a results perspective.  However, late at night, with a few drinks inside, it probably makes much more sense.

Its hard to explain but unless you know the subject matter well already, the tag cloud results seem so strangely unrelated. Good for novalty value, not so good if you need to find something and fast i.e. Give it to me now!

The other personal dislike is the name – like the swirling search result terms, Quintura just doesn’t mean anything…at least to me.  Does it mean anything or is it just another one of those web 2.0 company descriptors that sounds ‘hip’ but are nonesense?  Anyway, because it doesn’t seem to mean anything, I keep forgetting it and keep needing to look up at this blogs title to get the spelling right.  Not a good quality for the name of the search engine…perhaps when I forget the exact spelling I should use Google to find out the name of that new Russian search engine and while I’m there perhaps I should click a few adsense ads – perhaps a partnership between Google and Quintura along these lines would drive more revenue for them?

I have to say that this IS a beta and I love startups so hate giving this a ZERO virtual investment.  Anyone that has the courage to start something new and put their dreams on the line deserve success! I really wish this concept and Quintura well and much success but…

My Virtual Investment:
With my virtual $1M, I would stay searching for ‘that Russian Search engine thing’ on Google and invest $ZERO in Quintura.

http://www.quintura.com/

Andrew
Founder
http://www.AdvisorGarage.com

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