What is Quintura?

Quintura is a search engine, but not a Google or Yahoo! clone as such. In fact, its results are retrieved from Yahoo's directory through the use of their XML API but the presentation of the results is quite intruiging.

As you can see from the snapshot below, the user interface is split into 3 main sections, the top search bar, a left category presentation of the data, and a right search result.

When you enter a search term in the search text box and click on the loop icon, the matches and associated or related categories are displayed in the left part of the screen. To the right you should see a list of links to websites or pages.

When I searched for "hoohee", I got a list of categories from which I selected "free download" by clicking on it with the mouse. The top 4 results came all from this website. Interesting.

I then jumped and tried to search for my free radio automation software, Broadcast Power. The term "Broadcast Power" returned a link from hoohee.com in the third place. So, I tried selecting the different categories from the left to see if I can narrow my search and get to the home of Broadcast Power, http://www.bp2x.com. Couldn't do it by selecting from the categories.

Plan B. Let's search for "radio automation software" then. No where to be found there too, which is fine. This time there was a "free" category. Clicking on this one didn't return bp2x.com, but it did return at the top of the list "R.O.S.S. - Free Software for Radio Automation". R.O.S.S. has a link to bp2x.com. Not quite the same thing, but good enough.

I'm not too sure how to rate this engine. It definitely is an improvement on your standard search engines in terms of user friendliness of data presentation. I like the fact that it does not use flash to present the results, although, admitedly, I fancy nice graphics of some other search engines with flash user interfaces. However, flash powered search sites tend to be a bit slower than their HTML counterparts.

Give it a try, you might like it.

I will blog next about another search engine with an interesting flash user interface.