The Next Web

Quintura’s visual search: ‘iPhone for the search market’

Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.

Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.

The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?

Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”

That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.

(By the way, today is women’s day. So the guys from Quintura created a women-specific search engine. Ladies, please let us know what you think)

*Update: Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines mailed me that Quintura also handles Russian.

I hope you like that post!

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ManagedQ, Quintura, search, visual

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ManagedQ: A viable alternative for Google

Written on February 5, 2008 – 3:30 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

No search engine since Google has been able to captivate me for more than a few seconds. But this morning I found one that I sorta kinda maybe liked. A bit. And that is huge news!

The service I am talking about is ManagedQ, a Palo Alto based startup company founded by engineers from Stanford. ManagedQ is officially in ‘deep stealth’ right now but apparently not THAT deep because anyone can use it.

ManagedQ is not a Search Engine, or so they say. They aspire to become the first Search Application. The difference? Well according to their blog “A Search Application is dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query”.

Their story is that regular search engines are not helping you much. It is simply a matter of entering a search query and getting a bunch of results spat back without any form of interaction beyond that. This makes the Search engines of today little more than front-ends to large databases. ManagedQ wants to guide you through the whole search process by showing you a large screenshot of every result from your query and then create an ‘Executive Summary’ of each link they found. Then they shows you Persons, Places and Things that are related to your query. By hovering over menus you see new results clustered around your query. This works amazingly well.

As Pete Warden (The guy who first discovered ManagedQ) describes:

Traditionally you do a search and then click through to the results pages, eyeballing each one for the information you want. If the results aren’t good enough, you’ll go back and refine your query, doing a complete new search.

With ManagedQ, you’ve suddenly got an interactive refinement stage that lets you poke and prod the result set and easily get a lot more information. You can instantly narrow your search by ignoring bad results that don’t contain terms you want, without throwing away all the others that could be interesting. You can get a quick feel for whether the results are worth exploring by throwing in good indicator terms that are likely to be in the ones you want.

So will I trade in Google for ManagedQ? Probably not. But I might use it to visualize connections between people, things and places connected to stuff.

UPDATE: I got a message from the management team at ManagedQ with some comments:

The reason we call ourselves a Search Application is because we actually run on top of Google. So you’re still getting the exact same Google results except with a radically improved Search Experience. So for all the Google users out there, you’re not going to suffer any reduction in Search quality, only a drastic improvement in the Search process.

Additionally, the back-end is modular so we can connect it to Yahoo, Powerset, enterprise search engines, or any combination of the above.

We know we’re still brand new to the game, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. But we are constantly improving ManagedQ and with the help of the community we’re going to have the best Search Product.

With some time Boris, we hope to win over all of your Searches. But for today, thank you for searching with ManagedQ.

google, ManagedQ, new, search

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