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Hovering High With Quintura

Award-Winning Alternative Search Engine

by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 5 Dec 2007

Now this is an interesting one. If you've decided “HAH I'm going to ditch Google for the day!” then float on down to Quintura, an innovative search 'cloud' engine.

Quintura uses from what I can see Yahoo's search results but it's got an interesting interface to compliment it. Say a user searches for something, say... 'hippopotamus'; once searched you get the expected list of search results on the right but you also get another box on the left with a search 'cloud'. Those of you that might not know what a 'search cloud' is or even a 'cloud' in general let me explain, it's a white fluffy thing that floa..... nah not really it's a box that contains usually a set of random or page related Keywords that once clicked searches for that selected keyword. But the difference between the average cloud and the Quintura cloud is that the cloud changes to reflect what you’re searching.

So returning to my hippopotamus, once you've put in your search query, the box to the left changes and places the main word (hippopotamus) in the centre of the cloud in large red text with other related and connected search terms surrounding it that people often conjoin to the main word. For example, my search brought up such words as mammal, poster, animal, photos and so on. Once these terms have come up you can hover over one of them and the cloud will then change the search results to include the extra term and narrow down the cloud to include more in-depth search terms connected up with those two and so on. You can also use it to exclude certain words. The system is quite fun and you seem to find some quite unusual connections sometimes.

This interface feature won it the attention of altsearchengines.com, a Blog dedicated to informing its readers of interesting and often overlooked search engines that people may never find out about if they just stick to the giants of search - Google, Yahoo and MSN Live! The editor Charles Knight compiled a list of the top 10 alternative search engines and taking into account a number of different factors, decided to reward Quintura with the Alternative Search Engine Of The Year Award, so well done there.

I had a quick look through the other top finalist and the ones that caught my fancy where Exalead and Kooltorch. Exalead is quite a visual search engine you can sign up for an account which allows you to save your 'shortcuts' on your personal homepage, the shortcuts can be moved around the page and they also display a thumbnail of what the site it’s pointing at looks like. The search results you recieve have the same basic layout of ye average engine (header, description, URL) except a thumbnail adorns each result (same as shortcuts) which if clicked takes you to a preview of the page without having to leave your results. Seems quite good, especially because you can appreciate the visual design of the results straight from the search results or spot a logo to ensure you've found the site you where looking for.

Kooltorch is quite interesting, it splits the search results into circle shaped categories based on the Content of sites such as shopping, art, society, business etc. and allows you to view the previews by hovering over the little dots around the circles. It also searches Ebay for your term if you choose to do an Ebay search and uses the same display methods, except it can tell you how long the auction has to go so that's pretty funky. It’s nice to know that there are still other search engines that try to make it despite the buzz over the main competitors, so keep your eye out, you might find one that suits you!