Quintura Visual Search Engine Relaunches

At around 8 AM PST this morning, Moscow-based search engine Quintura will relaunch its visual search engine with a new user interface (if it looks like the screen shot below, it’s launched).

The company, which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype, AllPeers, Piczo, Nimbuzz) and OpenView Venture Partners, has developed technology that clusters related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as a tag cloud. Users can refine their searches by clicking on any word in the cloud – words that are closer and bigger than other words are more correlated to the initial query than other terms. Mousing over any word in the cloud shows related terms to that as well.

The company wisely moved away from a downloadable search application last year to a pure online service. The new interface moves the tag cloud to the left and search results to the right – previously the search results were below the cloud and seemed somewhat crowded.The site also has decent image and video search, and child-safe search.

If I’m looking for a specific website, Google or Yahoo is perfect. Like Clusty, I find Quintura to be useful for research or browsing based search where I am trying to find more information on a given topic. After testing it, I find that I’ve been back a few times to use the service.