Visual search engine Quintura gets a new interface
As announced by TechCrunch, the Moscow-based visual search engine Quintura has relaunched with a new interface today. It enables you to search through a combination of text input and browsing through a tag cloud of related terms, which give results on mouseover for quick apprehension.
When approaching new search solutions, the simplest way for me to try out the usefulness of a service is to act like I’m searching Google. With Quintura, the results were disappointing. It’s pretty much useless for finding something specific. It’s nice for contextual browsing, much like Wikipedia article-hopping, and finding previously undiscovered content, but if you want to find that article on radioactive cats you’ve read last week, forget it.
Additionally, the tag cloud is quite confusing - sometimes the terms will overlap each other, and sometimes they’ll move around, seemingly without any clear purpose. The back button will get you back to the previous results on the right side, but not the tag cloud results, which makes backtracking near-impossible. Also, the tag cloud browsing works pretty fast from a technical standpoint (new search results must load on every mouseover), but from a user standpoint it still seemed too slow for me - and better speed might very well be impossible to achieve.
If you’re ready to deal with its shortcomings, Quintura might be a nice tool for research, studying, casual browsing and finding new stuff. However, as a search tool it’s nowhere near the big guns like Google or Yahoo!. Do I see it making a big impact in the search field? Honestly, no.
*Update: after a bit more playing around with Quintura, I’ve realized that it’s actually not a search engine - it uses Yahoo’s search results pulled from their XML and wraps the tag cloud bit around that. It’s noted under Quintura’s search results, but it’s also easy to check: try the same search in Quintura and Yahoo! and you’ll get the same results. There’s nothing really wrong with this, except the fact that the service is dependent on Yahoo! and that it’s just a tiny bit less interesting this way.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Thank you for a good review! Frankly, we already started crawling the Web and indexing its content using our proprietary technology. That’s how we are going to improve a relevancy of search results. I have noticed that you have a tag cloud for site search. You will soon be able to make it interactive after joining our affiliate program for blogs and web-sites. We are planning to start the program shortly. Stay tuned to our developments.
Here is a hint on backtracking: just click a tag after you adds it to your search query and then the tag will be un-clicked or removed from the query. Plus, we should add a button “Go back” later on.
February 27th, 2007 at 1:11 am
@Yakov: an interactive tag cloud as a widget for web sites sounds interesting, I look forward to seeing it in action.
April 15th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
[…] 1. Search. Everyone big enough to buy it or develop it has already got some sort of search technology in their arsenal. But even if giants like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft and the millions they invested in their search technologies aren’t competition enough for you, check out the other hundreds of search engines, including meta-search engines, vertical search, semantic search, visual search and just plain old weird search. If you’re still bent on developing your search engine, there are a couple of things going for you. Although Google is already delivering better search results than anyone though possible 10 years ago, everyone still seems to be bent on the idea that there’s much to improve here. So, if your search even hints at being “smart” or “semantic”, you might get bought out by a giant. And that’s quite a good deal. […]
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