Today Internet search engine company Yahoo named start-up visual search engine Quintura one of its “25 Web Sites to Watch,” a listing of web sites Yahoo considers innovative and worth visiting. “One of them may become the next big web hit,” according to Yahoo news writer Preston Gralla. Quintura was founded in August of 2005 by Yakov Sadchikov in Sergiev Posad, near Moscow, Russia, and released their search engine site in November of 2005. The self-described “next-generation web search company" aims to "transform searching into finding," according to their web site, by allowing users to search the web using a visual interface that shows both a standard search results listing along with a visual representation of related search terms. This system is described on the company’s web site as “patent-pending technology […] based on over a decade of the founders' innovative research and development in the area of neural network and artificial intelligence." The privately held company has U.S. offices in Alexandria, Virginia, while the firm’s research and development is done in the company’s Russian offices.

Founded as the Fifth Element

The company was founded hoping to offer “the quintessence of search," according to Quintura’s web site, referring to the ancient Greek Pythagorean’s “fifth element” quintessence. The visualized search function the site provides “becomes the center of user experience replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings," according to the company web site.

The company offers a separate search engine site for children, called Quintura for Kids, and hopes to launch a specialty version of its site geared specifically towards women, called Quintura for Women, according to a “coming soon” notice on the company’s web site.

The visual search process Quintura provides works from “a graphical map that shows contextual relationships among words in the query. This map helps build a search query by giving hints or words to define the context of the query,” according to a description of the system on the company’s web site, which also notes that the map, “shows only those words that have close contextual relationships with the keywords in your query. Click a word to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query."

The size of the search term words shown in the site’s visual search engine vary based on their relevance, with some being smaller and others larger. “The larger words have a strong contextual relationship with your query,” according to the web site, which also offers users the ability to save visual search maps as projects for later retrieval.

Downloadable Desktop Application Too

Quintura also offers a more complete desktop application for download, in both English and Russian versions. Separate plug-ins for the Quintura Search application can be downloaded as well, including one for Google search results, an international Google search result plug-in, and another plug-in offering results from Alta Vista, Ask.com, Dogpile, Google, Lycos, MetaCrawler, MSN Search and Yahoo. Another plug-in for the desktop application allows Quintura Search to provide results from BBC News, CBS News, Google Blog Search, Google News, MSN News, Reuters, Technorati, and Yahoo News, while an additional plug-in allows for visually searching Amazon.com, Download.com, Google Desktop, Microsoft.com, scientific information search engine Scirus, Wikipedia, and Yahooligans. A specialized Russian plug-in is also available which allows visual searches of Aport, Mail, Nigma, Rambler, the Russian version of Wikipedia, and Yandex. German and Russian dictionaries are also available for download to help customers who wish to use the search service desktop application in those languages. A French language interface is also available for downloading from the site.

Millions More in Funding, and an Additional Award

Today on the Venture Beat web site, former San Jose Mercury News writer Matt Marshall has reported that Quintura has raised “several million” dollars from Mangrove Capital Partners of Luxembourg, which was an early investor in successful Internet voice-over-IP company Skype. Mr. Marshall also notes that Quintura has received additional funding from the ABRT Venture Fund and from OpenView Venture Partners of Boston, Massachusetts. Quintura founder Mr. Sadchikov is reported to have spoken to Mr. Marshall of plans to offer web sites the ability to replace their standard site maps with a special version of the company’s visual search engine, similar to the way that Internet search leader Google provides its own brand of search utility to web site owners. On November 27, 2006 Business Week magazine reported on its web site that “Mangrove is also backing Quintura,” and that Quintura claims that it can achieve search results bettering both Google and Yahoo.

Quintura has been awarded the “Search Engine of the Month” for June by Alt Search Engines, a Charlottesville, Virginia company, sharing the award with another new visually-oriented search engine site, KartOO. The Alt Search Engines web site, which aims to showcase “The most wonderful search engines you’ve never seen,” notes that Quintura founder Sadchikov refers to his search engine as a “web discovery engine,” and is entering into a partnership with Blinkx for adding video search results.