Visual-based search engine Quintura has taken Series A funding of “several million dollars” from Mangrove Capital Partners, an original seed investor in the company.
The capital will be used to scale the Quintura affiliate model for site search and build a semantic web index using Quintura’s “neural networking techniques”.
Quintura displays an interactive search cloud of related keywords and phrases to refine and narrow down searches.
The Quintura affiliate program will involve site owners placing the Quintura search cloud on their site with a revenue share model based on paid search placement.
Michael Arrington previously described the site in positive terms writing that he found Quintura “to be useful for research or browsing based search where I am trying to find more information on a given topic”; it’s definitely one of the better offerings amongst the army of new Web 2.0 search engines.
I wonder how many people seriously use these types of search engines regularly? Is Google’s demise so apparent that there’s a ton of room in this space, and this is really a good investment? I only ask because I have no experience using these alternatives *regularly* and don’t know anyone that doesn’t use either Google or Yahoo for searching.
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
Self-Serve Career Management
Quintura is an interesting concept, but as one would expect – the major search engines are constantly on the look out for innovative strategies – and will incorporate them in their algos.
So Google is now adding search suggestions at the bottom of their SERPs if they feel they queries are overly common
Yahoo has been doing this for quite some time.
It is just Quintera’s layout that is the major difference.
BTW:
on another note:
TECHCRUNCH has just been permanently linked to from Google’s latest blog (Public Policy Blog) this is a rarity because they usually only link to Google-oriented blogs.
http://googlepu...y.blogspot.com/
Read this Article:
http://whitesmo...new-stride.html
there are so many better search engines… than this ..
the name is too long and un – rememberable –
– Google still wins
Jason, I agree with your point. I am not sure if I have the time to spend on a visual search engine.
-GD
wow, yet another “web 2.0 search engine” that just doesn’t get search. oh well, what’s a few million down the drain?
If i navigate through those suggestions, then my eyes don`t wanna move to the “real results” on the right sidebar, they are stuck on those cloud movements.
Maybe it`s just for me ..
Jason..competing with google/yahoo is a bad investment..partnering with them..good investment. A search gadget that looks at multiple search engines..google/yahoo being two of them. Too bad Quintura (sp?) is an open API.
http://www.goog...amp;source=imag
oops….Too bad Quintura is NOT an open API..remote access to their service might be valuable.
The semantic web is finally growing.
Google is still undefeated search engine.
Other search companies such as ASK, MSN Live, Yahoo, Mahalo, mylivesearch, etc… Can’t beat it… They spend millions and millions dollar. None of highly educated employees can get jobs done. They fear competitors copy… If powerset.com have those cool innovation. I’ll bet you Google or MS have or Yahoo power to copy anything and write different source code. For example, Who invented search map? — Google maps, Yahoo maps, MSN maps.
I would give advice to Quintura. Don’t try to show off too much. You end up getting copied. It hurts when companies copy stuff from your works.
Interesting idea — so-so execution. The most prominent link that showed up after doing a search on “Excel 2007 performance” was “European Cars”. Their algorithms still need a bit of work.
I agree with other posters that there isn’t any real chance of beating Google here. But that’s not the point. People forget that Google doesn’t build most of their own stuff: they buy other small companies that have already built it. The real exit here for Quintura is if they can interest Google/MS/Yahoo in their technology enough to acquire them.
That said, I’m guessing that Quintura here mostly has a conceptual innovation, not a strong set of technology, and hence open to copying; and unless they’ve got better ideas in the pipeline, it’s always going to remain niche, not mainstream.
David Armstrong, et al,
Seems like Quintura is a mix of three things: 1. Yahoo, Blinkx and Amazon search index and algorithms, ported through their api’s, 2. licensed Brain or digital thesaurus type visualization tool, 3. some sort of licensed thesaurus semantic map to group single tags with their surrounding tags.
The last one doesn’t work very well at all. And the combo of the other two produces very random results. It is fun playing with the moving words, and watching the search results as I browsed, but I didn’t have the urge to click on a single thing because it was all so random, and in video, all things like CNN (I already know how to go to CNN and get today’s news, thanks).
I don’t understand who would give them millions for this. It’s all licensed and all they’ve done is make an interface that is a curiosity at best.
Answering your question, Quintura uses its own proprietary neural networking technology. BTW, Quintura was also covered today by ZDNet: Life without Google series at http://blogs.zd...com/BTL/?p=5397
and PC World: 25 web sites to watch at http://www.pcwo...es/article.html
Always like hearing about new search engines…Saw this mentioned in a ZDNet email as well.
Is the site down or is the search engine plain useless? My search for enterprise mashups isnt giving me any results! Any comments from the people at Quintura?
It works now
Noq quite sure what the problem was. But if I wasnt persistent, I wouldnt come back to the site.