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*Â 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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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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