Quintura Search Engine Redesigns

[Brett_Tabke]

Visual search engine Quintura has redesigned.

[quintura.com...]

[techcrunch.com...]

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.

[httpwebwitch]

i like it, as a toy. very cool interface, not without useability criticisms but I appreciate the concept and execution.

I don't think I'll use it for actual searching, for me this is a novelty

[Eric_Lander]

I think it's best used for fun searches right now. A simple improvement to the UI (IMHO) would be to swap the visuals to the right and the listings to the left...

Still, it's pretty neat.

[treeline]

Very fun. I like the interface how it is now. Would be nice if it were a little faster. The image search is a clever way to narrow them down, though it appears to be cover a pretty small set of images.

[flack47]

What a strange deal. . .

[hughie]

It is interesting, and i agree about the left right swap, it seems more natural.

The only thing i don't like is the speed, both client side and server side. if it was more instantaneous it would be really really interesting.

[econman]

Swapping the left and right sides might backfire. I think the reason it feels wrong to have the listings on the right, is because we have all gotten used to the standard SE interface, which puts the listings on the left and the ads on the right.

If they swapped these positions, users might not pay as much attention to the "cloud". Needless to say, this would be risky, since the "cloud" is their unique selling point. Shift things around and users might not notice the cloud of keyword suggestions as much, or play with it as much.

Personally, I didn't find the approach very appealing, but I suppose it might depend on the specific search -- how useful the the "cloud" of other keywords proves to be in a particular instance.

[docbird]

Coming soon Quintura for Women...

hmmm

[docbird]

as well as women's and kids' versions, maybe could also get version that works in Safari.
In Firefox, looks interesting, but don't figure I'll be using it instead of G for a while.