The Alternative Search Engine of the Year, 2007 – picked by Charles Knight is Quintura which is now campaigning with the tag line – “We are not afraid of Google!”

Quintura has been through several makeovers, but the basic idea is to pick out the main terms that could be used to refine the search. Quintura describes them as “those words and word combinations that are most closely connected with your search query”. The words are extracted from the documents, but there is a some analysis of semantics to pick ones that convey “context”. It’s a kind of clustering. Quntura used to show these terms as rays – lines to words, then adopted the tag cloud (which is better) and has modified it a few times too.

In the current beta version:
The size of the words in a cloud indicate importance. I presume that bigger letters mean a larger set.

Words in red are the current search terms.

Words in blue are the “context”. These are the related terms from the documents.

A word will change to a lighter red and have an X beside it when you point your mouse at it. As you hover over that word, the tag cloud and the search results will change to show you the effect of adding that word to the query. Click on the word to make the change. OR click on the X to exclude the word.

Icons mark target sites such as CNN or the CBC symbol. Click on those to go directly to the site. This site is likely dominant in the set of results for the associated word.

 

Quintura does the same with images and video (from Blinkx), and will display results from Amazon (any product) also with the tag cloud view.

Of course, you can add more terms to a query on your own, use quotation marks for phrases, and – to exclude terms. Fielded searches on title do not work. You can use site: (eg site:ca) but it disables the tag cloud.

There are more controls:
Move back and forward through searches

Embed the code for that query on a web page – essentially a saved search

Share the search / cloud through an email

Save the search to a bookmarks list or as a web page to your computer.

This kind of search engine will excel at the broad search – e.g. arctic sovereignty canada – where there are over 600,000 results, but I found it could still pick out context on smaller sets of 5,000.

Changing settings is the one thing that doesn’t work well. The Settings window extends beyond the bottom of the browser – and at least for me – is not fully visible no matter how many toolbars I remove and it cannot be closed without closing Quintura.

Considering again Charles Knight’s list of alternative engines – I concur that Quintura is the best of the list (except that I think that the excellent Answers.com, which is also on the list, isn’t an alternative engine – it is a knowledge tool.

Posted by Gwen December 3, 2007 here.

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