That man in constant motion Robert Scoble points to Quintura, an intriguing search engine based on refining your search through a tag cloud.
It boasts a clean interface, accompanied by a helpful one minute tour, and I found it simple to use. You type a query, related search terms appear in a tag cloud which you can add to your search by clicking on them, refining the search results below. You can roll your mouse over related search terms to see hints for additional search terms or click on an ‘x’ symbol to remove that term from your cloud.
It’s an interesting way of quicky refining your search results for ambiguous terms, e.g. spears (Britney or weapon?), something that Google and others have looked to address through predictive search ‘did you mean’ links within the search results.
The search results state that they are ‘Powered by Yahoo XML’ suggesting that Quintura technology can be built on top of other existing search services.
The service tries its best to include the relevant Web 2.0 must-haves, starting of course with the obligatory blog. However, ‘Share it’ at present just emails a link to Quintura to a friend rather than an extended social network of recommended sites. Likewise ‘Save it’ just shows you how to save a link to your search rather than any kind of social bookmarking.
These elements of course can be developed over time and this is at present a ‘beta’ (what isn’t these days?). Their corporate site indicates there’s more plenty in the pipeline, so this is one to watch.
Discussion
No comments yet.