Latest Upgrade from Quintura Visual Find Engine – Social See and Find Online!

(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog at ITtoolbox)

Tags: Quintura, Quintura for Kids, Search Engines, Google, Knowledge Management, KM, Content Management, Alternative Search Engines, Tagging, Tags, Innovation, Visual Search Engine, Search Tagclouds, Social Search, Search 2.0

If you remember, a couple of months back I created a weblog entry over here about one particular search engine that was making its way into becoming one of my favourites for the way in which it was getting to display search results focusing more on the visual aspects of it rather than on some kind of linear display of those same search results. Yes, indeed, back then I was talking about Quintura. And today, a few months afterwards, I am going to be talking about it again because, in case you may not know, it has just released a new version worth while exploring, to say the least.

Yes, I know that most of you are going to say that you all depend pretty much on Google for all of your searches. Same over here, of course, but do you actually have got alternatives. Do you play with them? Do you make use of other search engines and find out that the results provided by Google are somewhat different than whatever those other search engines provide? In short, do you actually trust Google to provide you with accurate results all the time?

Well, I used to. And very much so. Till I opened up to see what other search engines were doing and found out that sometimes Google is not keeping up with the same standards it used to at some point in time. Perhaps one indicator of the issues that imply diversifying your product line. Either way, that is why lately I have actually been using a number of different search engines to see what other options are there for those times where I feel Google fails to provide me with what I want. Over at the fine Read/WriteWeb weblog you would be able to find an impressive entry where you can find Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. Lots of great choices in there. And, of course, several of my favourites are listed over there as well. Quintura being one of them. Worth while a read for sure.

However, and ever since Quintura has launched a new version of the online search engine in the last couple of days there have been a whole bunch of folks who have been commenting about the new version and what it actually does. And quite a lot of interest from the past is also coming along, including the superb attempt to make it closer to kids the usage of search engines. Yes, indeed, who said that searching the Web could not be just as much fun for kids, eh?

This is just one of the many things that I like about Quintura. Not the fact that it is providing a good solid alternative to Google and other popular search engines, nor the fact that it has put a nice set of new features as part of the upgrade, nor the fact that they are trying to reach out to new markets, but the fact that they are always on the verge of pushing their limits and see how far they can go. And that is just exactly what they have done with this latest version. A commitment to keep pushing for innovation in a space where we all thought it was all written down for everyone else. Well, not the case apparently.

Last night I actually got an e-mail in my Inbox with the press release that was put together and, instead of me detailing some of the key innovations that Quintura has put together, I am actually going to quote a couple of paragraphs from the press release that are quite descriptive of the new changes coming along with the upgrade and what you can expect from it:

"Quintura offers an intuitive way to refine and narrow a search. The innovative graphical user interface of Quintura presents search results in two panes – the left pane contains a preset interactive tag cloud and the right pane lists search results. The intuitive nature of the cloud allows web users to refine their search by clicking on tags that appear in the cloud. Holding a mouse cursor over a tag in the cloud causes new, related tags to appear surrounding an original tag and search results to change in the scrollable right pane. Clicking a tag in the cloud the web users can easily refine a search and navigate through visual clusters of search results.

Quintura is the first to display graphical images (favorite icons) next to tags (search terms) in the tag cloud. The icon is associated with a URL that corresponds to a search term. Clicking the icon users can visit web pages right from the tag cloud making Quintura easy to use for simple search queries."

Don’t tell me that after reading through those two paragraphs of text you don’t feel intrigued enough to actually go and check it out. Yes, I thought so. I have actually been taking it for a spin ever since I got first alerted about it from the Techcrunch weblog entry and so far I am really enjoying the experience. It surely makes my searching habits much more visual and appealing to the eye to just go along with those tags till I find what I am looking for on the right panel of the displayed search results. I knew I was off to a great start when I was first exposed to it back in November last year, but what they have just done with this particular release is push forward innovation really hard in a space, Web Search Engines, that I bet we all thought it was all invented already with Google.

Well, think again because that is not the case. If you are looking for an alternative search engine, there is probably no better place to get you going than Quintura. Whether you want it for yourself, or for your kids, this is one of those search engines that it surely is going to help you surf the Web in a breeze and much more intuitively than whatever else you may have experienced in the past. I must say that if their innovations keep going at this pace Quintura will be winning enough points to make it for my default search engine. It is probably not there just yet, but I suspect it will be some time soon. How about you? Found your own alternatives to Google, yet?