Images: Life without Google: Quintura a nice alternative
Quintura is another visual search engine that relies heavily on cloud tags. These tags come in handy when you want to view relationships at a glance. Overall, Quintura is a good alternative for folks looking to cut back on Google.
For instance, when I search on my name my relationship with ZDNet becomes clear. Also SeekingAlpha's pickups of my blog posts are evident.
The tags also come in handy when doing image searches. By mousing over that tags on the left you can get images from specific sources. Each tag is a way to drill down.
Clicking on video in the Steve Jobs image search calls up results that appear to have the words video mentioned along with Jobs.
As for the video search, Quintura did work well. The layout works nicely and I was able to hit the tags and wind up with other results, say Bill Gates and Jobs video together. Note that the video search on Quintura is powered by Blinkx.
Any search can be saved easily. It's a nice feature if you're hopping around from search to search.
In addition searches can be shared easily via email. That's a nice social feature that could help Quintura find more users. The same email feature seen here can invite others to use Quintura.
Those social features will be necessary if Quintura is to grow. Notice the "Add to Firefox" text in the upper right. The link is most likely there because it wasn't easy to add Quintura to Firefox as a choice relative to other engines. Simply put, Quintura will have two hurdles: Getting people to go to Quintura in the first place and then convincing them to make it an option.
Adding Quintura to IE7 was a bit easier. However, there was a small hurdle here also. Microsoft allows you to add any search provider as long as you do a search on "TEST" and cut and paste the link into a box to install. The problem: Finding that link isn't easy on Quintura since the URL in the browser stays the same. The way to get the TEST search URL is to pretend you're sharing the link with a friend, which generates a URL, and then pasting that address into IE7.
The future of Quintura may lie in creating search engines for specific groups. Quintura has launched Quintura Kids and plans a search for women soon.