The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim.
The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal.
Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results.
I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they can keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.”
tag cloud is annoying and geh
But a nice gimmick that will give Maxim readers the wow factor they want.
Tag clouds are stupid. A simple reverse sorted list in order of rank is far better, and if you want to use more horizontal screen real estate, you would be better off categorizing the results into columns.
TC continues to degenerate into jumping on every useless Web 2.0 fad bandwagon.
Yeah. Cloud? Dumb.
Hahaha. Note the screenshot is of “hot sex” and “lord of the rings” is somehow related.
bec the big Y isn’t cool, right?
http://www.sos....ions_j.htm#1341
I thought this wasn’t legal yet? Somebody jumped the gun.
I just don’t understand the obsession with Yahoo, if you guys don’t like Yahoo, sell its stock and buy something else for godsakes.
Quintura is powered by Yahoo XML
It says so in the search results.
@8 Maxim is powered by YUI, but Quintura has it’s own XML
BTW, Quintara search on Maxim FAILS in Firefox 3.0
Open this link in Firefox 3.0:
http://www.maxi...px?kw=hot%20sex
Then in Explorer
Nada. Over 50% of my visitors are on Firefox.
Yahoo is now the laughing stock of the bay area, Google’s bitch.
It’s fascinating to see how many people are turning their backs and jumping ship from this still profitable company. Short of a miracle, the writing is on the wall and it hasn’t been pretty for quite some time.
Jon
http://dreamclue.com …get the message!
this would go in the BFD category.
We can see why you are a fan of the “Tag Cloud”, perv.
Yes, when I think of hot sex I immediately associate it with Star Trek & Star Wars.
the whole search results are based on yahoo’s index
Did Yahoo hire Isiah Thomas because man are they starting to look like the New York Knicks?
AOL’s been supposedly dead, for what, 8 years? Yet, they keep on chuggin. The Time Warner acquisition didn’t help them, just like MS won’t help Y!. And Yahoo is in a far better position than AOL was.
AOL, like Yahoo, followed the normal curve to maturity. It seems like once a company gets over the “hockey stick” hype growth area and hits market saturation, the denizens of hype in the valley pronounce the company’s days numbered.
Companies which no longer follow hype curves, but must grow as real businesses, at non-exponential rates, are “dead”
Erik said…
Quintura is a visual search engine that clusters results together into contextually-related topics, which it displays as a tag cloud.
Yahoo , Google, Microsoft are already doing document/text clustering already. The only question to ask if Quintura’s clustering algorithm has lower error than the ones used by the major vendors and I suspect that the answer is no. The major vendors have a proper R&D division and their job is to scour the literatures to find something useful and also invent their own algorithms that must have performance better than their existing ones. This means they evolve, if they invent better ones at a rate of one per week, then of course they will do a new deployment once every week. Search accuracy is paramount for business survival, that you don’t withhold a new deployment of a new algorithm to be done in 2, 3, 4 months time, etc,… because by then your competitor might have edged you out in that time frame by deploying their own. This example is hypothetical, but this is how a company with a proper R&D division work. If Quintura has such a division, then they’re welcome to challenge the search vendor incumbents.
search cloud really sucks! i hate that innovation..it appealing
Erik,
Ultimately Maxim is still getting Y! search results. Seems like the quintura is powered using yahoo! search.
stop bitching people and give it up to Yakov who is doing some good work!
The good thing about employing a tag cloud, is that you can put in contextual ads much more effectively (as far as I can guess).
Anyway, its always the ones who shout BFD that miss the boat….
Quintura is a Russian based company, looks to me like the only American company using it is Maxim.com…
Erik, if you took more than a cursory glance at a product before writing an article you would know Quintura is just a tag cloud on top of Yahoo’s search feed. So no, Maxim *Search* is still supplied by Yahoo, just wrapped with Quintura’s cloud feed.
Poor old yahoo. Should have done the deal with the gatesman!!!!!
2008 has been a terrible year for Yahoo. Cannot seem to get anything right
Yup.. 2008 has been terrible for Yahoo.. I think they should have just sold out. Microsoft was really offering a fair price!
Hmm interesting times ahead.
As I can see, the Quintura uses de Yahoo Search XML… may be they do somenthing inside…
Yahoo maybe having trouble on the outside – but you have to admit – it’s a matter of perception not reality. Over 400 million people use and depend on yahoo. What people fail to recognize – it’s the business of advertising that is failing – not the use of users.
I know people who can’t surf the web unless it’s thru yahoo – and have no clue of google.
I just wish yahoo would get back on track as a business and a service.
and as for Microsoft buying yahoo – I think they should stand alone – what hurt them was the perception of weakness and the idiodizy of playing games with microsoft. made them [ yahoo ] look weak..
thanks
I hate tag cloud
Tag cloud = no match for real search.