Russian search engine Quintura (one of our sponsors) has released a private beta of a custom search service for blogs or websites. It’s similar to the Eurekster swicki we use on ReadWriteWeb. The defining feature of Quintura’s service is a tag cloud that moves fluidly when you click it – see it in action on our network blog AltSearchEngines.
If you’d like to check out Quintura’s private beta, click here. Read on for some background on the semantic technology powering Quintura…
Quintura has been marketing itself lately as a Google killer. But something I hadn’t realised until recently is that Quintura uses Semantic Web technologies to power its search engine. Yakov Sadchikov, President and CEO of Quintura, told me that “as opposed to Google’s PageRank, the Quintura algorithm utilizes an ‘active’ semantic networking technology. The Quintura algorithm involves a lot of parallel calculations that only became possible with today’s computer processing power.” He went on to say that “Quintura indexes a set of documents and builds a semantic network of them. The network is displayed visually as a dynamic tag cloud.”
Theoretically this means that search results are based on context, rather than on how many people linked to it – as Google’s PageRank essentially is. There is a lot of search innovation happening outside of Google, but semantic search is seen as The Holy Grail solution in some quarters. I still find Google’s super-fast search to be more than adequate for my daily search needs, but as we move into this new Web era of Semantic Apps and open data, it’s good to see new types of search emerging.
