E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Quintura Kids – Safest Search Engine for Children – Where It Matters

Tags: Quintura, SearchEngineWatch, Search Engines, Search 2.0, Search Engine 2.0, Fact Monster, Quintura Kids, Amit Chowdhry, Phil Bradley, Web, Internet, Knowledge Tools, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Innovation, Children, Kids, Safe Internet

You would remember how, in the past, I have been talking about this particular search engine a couple of times already, Quintura, that provides you with an interesting and refreshingly visual new method of finding what you are after. In a world that little by little gets dominated by other much more powerful search engines, like Google, Yahoo! or whatever else, it is, indeed, rather refreshing to see how other folks take care not only of the accuracy of the search results, but also providing you with the right user experience. And all of that to make it much more effective and appealing for you.

But what happens when you are younger? I mean, a lot younger. As I youngster, or even younger, as a kid, how is that user experience? How accurate are those search engines to meet your needs and fulfil them? I know that some of us do not get to think much about these things, and we probably should, but for parents I bet that it is something completely different, that is always in their minds: opening up the Internet to their children in a protected environment. How do you do that?

Well, according to a recent weblog post by SearchEngineWatch, it looks like there is hope. Yes, that is right. In a weblog post titled Savvy Little Searches they get to share their results after performing a number of searches, based on some other interesting criteria (Visual Appeal to a Child, Relevance to a Child, Commercial vs. Educational, Ease of Navigation) and they came to the conclusion that both Fact Monster and Quintura Kids are both of them as good as it gets!

I am not very much familiar with Fact Monster and would probably try to find out some more about it. But I was surely glad to read how Quintura Kids is also one of the best! Both Amit Chowdhry and Phil Bradley get to share their feedback on the subject and I must say that I really enjoyed Amit’s quote stating: "Quintura for Kids takes into account the innocence of children and filters out inappropriate content in a more advanced manner than the other search engines out there. "

I couldn’t have agreed more with it and I am really glad to hear that not only Quintura is pushing innovation further into the search engine 2.0 space, but also I am happy to see how Quintura Kids becomes top of the tops when providing Web content to children in the right context, at the right time and for the right purpose.

As I said, it will probably not get any better than this, but one thing that we have to remember, and which perhaps would bring forward some food for thought for us all, is that younger generation, not too long into the distant future, would become the leaders of the world and it is surely rewarding to see how Web search engines like Quintura Kids are already paving out their way to navigate through the Internet helping them find what they need. And as time goes further, move on to the next step. Just perfect.

Here is the graphic with the results put together on where each search engine sits. Quite revealing to say the least:

Thus, still think that the Internet is not for children any longer? Hummm. you may need to think again…

Congrats to the Quintura folks for such a huge achievement and here is another cheer to their constant innovation and talent put together to help us get the most out of what we really need and forget about everything else. Even at such an early age, because why waste time, right?

Quintura Now on to Visualise Video Search – Where Is the Limit?

(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog, at ITtoolbox)

Tags: Quintura, Blinkx, Search Engines, Search 2.0, Knowledge Tools, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Content Management, Google, Visualisation, Video, Video Search

You may remember how there have been a few times that I have been talking in both of my Internet weblogs about one particular search engine that, as time goes by, I am really starting to be very fond of: Quintura. Yes, that is right! I know that most people out there would say that why should you bother with other search engines when you have got Google, the one and only, right? Well, I have said this in the past, and I guess I will be saying it as well once more: just because of that very same reason. Because it is always a good thing to check out things from the other side and see if they would still stick together for you.

In my own case, Google doesn’t stick together as much as I would be hoping for. There are times where I am looking for something a bit more innovative than just another regular search engine and in that particular case I have got a bunch of dedicated innovative search engines that I have grown to become very fond of. One of such pack is Quintura and by the looks of it, I am not sure what you think, but it seems that things are getting even better. And not just for Quintura.

You probably have seen this already elsewhere, but still I think it would be a good thing to include it over here as well for the sake of the flow from this weblog entry. A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from Yakov where he was announcing that Quintura and Blinkx are to Visualise Video Search. Now, how cool is that? Or, better, how innovative is that? *Very*. Well, here is an excerpt of the announcement:

"Blinkx, the largest video search engine on the Web, has announced that Quintura, a visual discovery engine dedicated to finding web-based entertainment easier and more intuitive, will use blinkx to power video search on www.Quintura.com.

Quintura employs a unique graphical user interface with an interactive tag cloud to visually navigate and easily refine searches. Quintura’s neural networking technology discovers related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as the interactive tag cloud. Users can then refine or narrow down their searches by clicking on any word or phrase in the cloud.

Under the terms of the agreement, blinkx will power a video search functionality on www.Quintura.com, allowing Quintura to leverage results from blinkx’s index of over 7 million hours of rich media content."

Are here you have got a couple of quotes from both parties involved:

""blinkx’s large video index is a perfect compliment to our graphical user interface,"said Yakov Sadchikov, CEO and Founder of Quintura. "As the Web becomes more visual and rich with content, people are looking for better ways to find video online. blinkx’s video search index combined with Quintura’s visual discovery engine provides users with a unique search experience. This new service has become possible due to technology innovations of our companies in visualizing search and indexing online video."

"We are excited to be powering video search for Quintura," said Suranga Chandratillake, CTO and Founder of blinkx. "Through blinkx’s advanced speech recognition technology, we are able to deliver better results than typical rich media search engines, giving Quintura users the ability to find, experience and share all forms of online video.""

Yes, indeed, I will say it again. How innovative is that? In an Internet world where more and more rich media is being produced all over the place there is a time where you probably need to step away from conventional search engines to still be able to find all of that social media content, because there is probably a time where you would need to watch that video or find that important presentation recorded in video format, or watch that particular screencast on how a particular tool works and so forth, and perhaps there may be certain search engines not apt for the job.

Well, definitely both Quintura and Blinkx are not having that problem, because this particular announcement is certainly going to help them become a whole lot more attractive from the perspective of being able to not only provide the right content at the right time, but also from a wider range of social media tools, which is, after all, what we are all probably looking for. A single point of entry where we can search for any kind of related content to the topics we are interested in. And both Quintura and Blinkx certainly do a great job in that, I tell you.

I know that in the past I have not been weblogging much about Blinkx, but I have still been using it quite extensively all of the place, because otherwise where do you think am I getting all of the different inspiring videos I have been sharing all along And certainly now with the joint work put together between Quintura and Blinkx things are going to get easy, way *too easy*, to find all of the content you would be interested in the first place. That is for sure.

This is just what innovation is all about and in an area that you probably thought it was all done and invented, right? Well, not quite. Here you have got two interesting players showing us all that we may not have reached the limit just yet…

Latest Upgrade from Quintura Visual Find Engine – Social See and Find Online!

(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog at ITtoolbox)

Tags: Quintura, Quintura for Kids, Search Engines, Google, Knowledge Management, KM, Content Management, Alternative Search Engines, Tagging, Tags, Innovation, Visual Search Engine, Search Tagclouds, Social Search, Search 2.0

If you remember, a couple of months back I created a weblog entry over here about one particular search engine that was making its way into becoming one of my favourites for the way in which it was getting to display search results focusing more on the visual aspects of it rather than on some kind of linear display of those same search results. Yes, indeed, back then I was talking about Quintura. And today, a few months afterwards, I am going to be talking about it again because, in case you may not know, it has just released a new version worth while exploring, to say the least.

Yes, I know that most of you are going to say that you all depend pretty much on Google for all of your searches. Same over here, of course, but do you actually have got alternatives. Do you play with them? Do you make use of other search engines and find out that the results provided by Google are somewhat different than whatever those other search engines provide? In short, do you actually trust Google to provide you with accurate results all the time?

Well, I used to. And very much so. Till I opened up to see what other search engines were doing and found out that sometimes Google is not keeping up with the same standards it used to at some point in time. Perhaps one indicator of the issues that imply diversifying your product line. Either way, that is why lately I have actually been using a number of different search engines to see what other options are there for those times where I feel Google fails to provide me with what I want. Over at the fine Read/WriteWeb weblog you would be able to find an impressive entry where you can find Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. Lots of great choices in there. And, of course, several of my favourites are listed over there as well. Quintura being one of them. Worth while a read for sure.

However, and ever since Quintura has launched a new version of the online search engine in the last couple of days there have been a whole bunch of folks who have been commenting about the new version and what it actually does. And quite a lot of interest from the past is also coming along, including the superb attempt to make it closer to kids the usage of search engines. Yes, indeed, who said that searching the Web could not be just as much fun for kids, eh?

This is just one of the many things that I like about Quintura. Not the fact that it is providing a good solid alternative to Google and other popular search engines, nor the fact that it has put a nice set of new features as part of the upgrade, nor the fact that they are trying to reach out to new markets, but the fact that they are always on the verge of pushing their limits and see how far they can go. And that is just exactly what they have done with this latest version. A commitment to keep pushing for innovation in a space where we all thought it was all written down for everyone else. Well, not the case apparently.

Last night I actually got an e-mail in my Inbox with the press release that was put together and, instead of me detailing some of the key innovations that Quintura has put together, I am actually going to quote a couple of paragraphs from the press release that are quite descriptive of the new changes coming along with the upgrade and what you can expect from it:

"Quintura offers an intuitive way to refine and narrow a search. The innovative graphical user interface of Quintura presents search results in two panes – the left pane contains a preset interactive tag cloud and the right pane lists search results. The intuitive nature of the cloud allows web users to refine their search by clicking on tags that appear in the cloud. Holding a mouse cursor over a tag in the cloud causes new, related tags to appear surrounding an original tag and search results to change in the scrollable right pane. Clicking a tag in the cloud the web users can easily refine a search and navigate through visual clusters of search results.

Quintura is the first to display graphical images (favorite icons) next to tags (search terms) in the tag cloud. The icon is associated with a URL that corresponds to a search term. Clicking the icon users can visit web pages right from the tag cloud making Quintura easy to use for simple search queries."

Don’t tell me that after reading through those two paragraphs of text you don’t feel intrigued enough to actually go and check it out. Yes, I thought so. I have actually been taking it for a spin ever since I got first alerted about it from the Techcrunch weblog entry and so far I am really enjoying the experience. It surely makes my searching habits much more visual and appealing to the eye to just go along with those tags till I find what I am looking for on the right panel of the displayed search results. I knew I was off to a great start when I was first exposed to it back in November last year, but what they have just done with this particular release is push forward innovation really hard in a space, Web Search Engines, that I bet we all thought it was all invented already with Google.

Well, think again because that is not the case. If you are looking for an alternative search engine, there is probably no better place to get you going than Quintura. Whether you want it for yourself, or for your kids, this is one of those search engines that it surely is going to help you surf the Web in a breeze and much more intuitively than whatever else you may have experienced in the past. I must say that if their innovations keep going at this pace Quintura will be winning enough points to make it for my default search engine. It is probably not there just yet, but I suspect it will be some time soon. How about you? Found your own alternatives to Google, yet?