December 31, 2006
quintura search clouds
[A Quintura search cloud for “gapingvoid”.]
About a month ago at one of these geek parties I met a young Russian chap named Yakov Sadchikov. I liked Yakov.
It turns out Yakov is a very bright guy. He’s got this new search engine start-up called Quintura. And there’s a Kid’s Quintura as well.
Quintura is pretty clever because it arranges its search results in tag clouds. “Visualised Search”, as it were. I’ve been playing around with it these last few weeks.
Do I like it? Sure. Do I like it so much that I’ve stopped using Google as a result? No. But anyone who does even a half-decent job of trying to move “Search” forward gets my respect. So hats off to Yakov.
Michael Arrington recently wrote that Google will have to still live up to its famous “Don’t be evil” tagline, even though now they have tons of money, with lots of advertisers and shareholders to keep happy.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Google is no longer in the search business, Google is now in the cash cow business. And money, like Cyndi Lauper once sang, changes everything.
Maybe they should change their tagline to “Don’t be THAT evil”. More believable, somehow.
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the profit motive — we are surprised?
Cheers
just wait until google gets the vide portion of the business running. they have already begun monetizing google video ads.
I like the fact that Google have thus far used their brains to find ways around the obvious evil routes to meeting the needs of the shareholders, the users, and themselves; for example by refining their advertising technology to actually target real customers instead of pummeling random people.
Of course, in doing something like this, they still manage to ruffle feathers because some see it as an invasion of privacy. Okay, maybe “don’t be evil” is a tall order, but not as tall as “don’t appear to be evil to anyone, ever”.
Quitura, is recompiled Yahoo! search results. It is not a new serach engine revolutionizing search with new types of rating systems. It’s not a “search engine start up” until and if it ever has it’s own search index. I wish people would stop treating it as something it’s not.
What about “Don’t get *caught* being evil?”
Look at http://www.clusty.com. Their clusty labs page does something very similar.
Hugh and your readers, Happy New Year! To add to your post, Quintura is building a web index. It’s going to be based on context and what we call a Semantic Web. We are striving to bring users a new search experience and going to shortly introduce other innovations. Stay tuned!