Earlier on today a colleague of mine at work pointed me towards a new search engine application that he thought I should have a look into and play around with it. More than anything else because of its similarity with Kartoo, one of my favourite alternative search engines, next to Mooter, Clusty or Accoona. So I had to give it a try. And I installed Quintura. And so far I love the experience ! Indeed, Quintura is one of those applications difficult to explain how it works until you go ahead and give it a try. There is just so much to say about it and perhaps the best way to give you a little bit of an introduction is by checking the online tutorials they have created on the application itself. You can find them over here and here. Then you could also head over to the screen shots section of Quintura’s Homepage to find out some more about it.
I am sure that after having gone through all those resources you would be looking forward to giving it a try. I know, I did. And I have enjoyed so much the experience that so far it has been the only search application I have been using the whole day today. And it works like a charm. So what is it exactly? How does it work ? Why would it be worth while using it as opposed to other search engines? Well, there are plenty of reasons that you could look into but I just thought I would mention the top five reasons why I feel that Quintura is worth while taking a look at and play around with for some time:
- It is very easy to use. You just have to install the application like you would do with any other tool, then launch it and without hardly any further setting up of preferences off you go ready to search and look for the information you were interested in. Even the results displayed to you are equally easy to access and interpret. More to come on this subject further down.
- You can personalise your searches with whatever the criteria, choosing your own search engines, and there are quite a few of them, including weblogging search engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Then indicating whatever the scope you would want to restrict your search with and afterwards allowing you to save those search results so that you can reuse them at a later time.
- A refreshing, and quite unexpected, set of results are returned back to you time and time again. As an example, and while looking for Knowledge Management resources, it brought me as one of the results KM, CMS and Portal Links, which offers quite an interesting read for some additional resources around the world of KM. I wasn’t able to find that particular resource straight up front in some of the other popular search engines.
- It works with all popular web browsers going from Opera to Mozilla. And, yes, it also works with Flock, my default web browser. So I no longer need to depend on a particular browser to view the results. I can just use whichever one I may have set up as my default. And that is a good thing. Specially for those folks using alternative web browsers.
- And, finally, perhaps the one and only feature that has got me sold so far on the application itself. And that is the usage of mapping or maps of the results showing the different relationships of each of the different search keywords in such a way that whenever I have results returned back to me I can see their relationship with the rest of the terms and therefore can relate more to the kind of information I am searching for and that is getting displayed in front of me. As I said, this particular feature is very similar to what Kartoo does and I am glad I have been recommended Quintura because this kind of search engines are just very refreshing not only from the perspective of getting those results but also because it helps detail the different relationships between each set of terms and learn along the way where you would be able to find the necessary information without wasting too much time. Those relationships will allow you in the end to have a much more visual representation of where the correct results are and therefore would allow you to remember them better for the next time. Mind you though that you can also save the different searches your perform and revisit them at a later time.
As you will be able to notice lots of different good capabilities, functions and options to get you going. But that is not all of that. They also have got a weblog where they share some more insights about how the application works and, much more interestingly, a description of some of the most interesting features put together into the tool. So that if you are not happy with them you could try to get them improved by submitting your own comments on future enhancements.
Overall, I must say that I am very pleased with the application itself and will continue to use it over the next few months in order to be able to get the most out of it for all of the search results and get much more accurate and relevant visualisation results of what I am searching for. Thus if you haven’t tried out the tool I would strongly suggest you give it a try for a few days and see how it would work with you. I am sure you will find it a different search engine with many capabilities than whatever other engines and if on top of that we keep on getting much more relevant resources as part of those results I guess we have got a winner, right ?
Thanks much, Stefano !
Technorati Tags: Quintura, Search Engines, Clusty, Mooter, Accoona, Kartoo, Visualisation, Mapping
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