Imagine being Tom Cruise in Minority Report, sifting through volumes of data with the flick of your fingers on a huge virtual screen to arrive at the precise information that could save the world? Quintura's "see and find" visual search engine is a first significant step in that right direction.

You first encounter a bunch of tags (which they call "cloud") akin to a visual map when you start the search process. Each comes with a sub-list of keywords and phrases, to help broaden or narrow down your search as the case may be! The right hand side (like all right brains) behaves in a conventional search engine way, displaying lists of search results. The further you delve into the cloud, the search engine adds the selected words to the query to narrow down and refine your search results. The search process is also aided by 'Auto-refine results' and 'Coverage' options.

Despite the clutch of web 2.0 companies, Quintura has no trouble standing out.

"Quintura is the first search engine that helps visually find web pages, images, and video content. The new search experience is based on See & Find™ concept where users can see and refine their searches within an interactive tag cloud and instantly find relevant information." Read More

Does it live up to it? For example, typing in the term "California" generates a map with words like department, find, home, hotel, United States, etc. Click on hotel and you get more keywords associated with both "california" and "hotel." One can add or remove words from the cloud to make the query more specific. On a lark, I double-clicked the visual map to add "song" to my query. Success!

Easy visual navigation and Intuition are two themes that jump out about the search process. We see the semantic relationships of words on the visual map, for example the size of a word shows its significance in relation to the query, Is this the end of my relationship with the "Next Page" buttons of Google and Yahoo ? What if I don't have to retype various combinations of the same set of keywords to try and get my relevant results displayed on first couple of pages ? As you salivate at that possibility, why not ' Save it ' your search and ' Share it ' with a friend (Who wants to hang out at my cloud nine ?! )

We are not just members of the club, we want to be the President For Extra Credit, we downloaded the more robust version 1.5 of Quintura Search. Quick to download and it easily installed on our PC, this is when you are really welcomed to the full potential of the engine. Now we are in the advanced search mode. We loved these additions:

* Choose search engine of our choice * Scope** feature to virtually drill into a topic of choice by adding and removing query words at each level to set further directions of searching * Functional Toolbar to Undo, Redo, Stop, Start, Update results and Save search * Simple Visual map Context Menu to add, remove, exclude, edit query words * Results Filter (*editor's choice award winner* ) to display new links since last search, create Favorite links, Exclude selective links, Hide sites, Delete old links not relevant to modified scope * Lucid help sections

So did other users from the sound of it!

"Instead of a jungle of Web sites you have to ferret through in order to find what you're look ting for, it would be so much easier if you had a "map" where you could narrow down your search without having to click through dozens of pages of results!" Read more.

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, then kids are definitely from another dimension! So thank Team Quintura, who are convinced that men, women and kids not only process information differently, but search for it differently as well! Quintura for kids, is a colorful, cartoony treat, sure to be highly appealing to kids. Plus, the site only has kid related material, so nothing taboo is going to come their way. On the cards is Quintura for women.

Quintura has raised monies through Mangrove Capital Partners of Luxembourg, an early-stage investor in Skype, ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston.

Though Google and Yahoo! are considered competition, serious rivals include Clusty.com, which has tied up with Wikipedia, to provide a search and info model. It all points to just one thing, it's never quiet on the search engine front!

Quizzing Quintura - our chat with them

As with most online companies, your company is pretty cool. Where did it come from? The technology of Quintura is based on over a decade of the founders' innovative research and development in the area of neural network and artificial intelligence. Quintura is privately held and has US offices in Alexandria, Virginia and Research & Development operations in the Moscow region of Russia.

What is the advantage of searches based on tags versus Boolean strings? Visualization that is the main feature used in Quintura, becomes the center of the user experience, replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings. Searches based on Boolean strings provide users with too many results, if your query is rather loose or, conversely, too few if your query parameters are too tight. With the tags, Quintura visual map shows the context of your query, those words and word combinations that are most closely connected with your search query. Quintura allows you to change your query at any step by clicking a tag and drill as deep as you need.

Your user interface has a great & unique layout, where did the idea come from? Having in mind the idea of making web search easier and more intuitive we wanted to create a user- friendly interface. Quintura tag cloud ensures faster and easier results with fewer mouse clicks.

Will Quintura ever consider offering pay-per click advertising? Quintura continues to distribute MIVA's Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Call Ads on our downloadable version, giving users the choice of either clicking or calling through to relevant information. We are also planning to introduce search ads into our online services.

How does Quintura ability to index images & video differ from Google's ability? Again, it is currently powered by Yahoo!XML. However, we give our users additional benefit by allowing manipulating their query context and rearranging the list of found images or videos according with their needs.

Is there RSS feeds available with Quintura? No, Quintura doesn't provide its users with RSS feeds. We plan to add this feature in the near future.

About the Author

Carl Williams

Marketing Director

Odinjobs

770-783-1401

http://www.odinjobs.com/blogs/page/thatsinteresting