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November 02, 2006
Quintura Clouds The Search Market
Quintura, out of Russia, aims to make search more visual, exploiting a click reducing feature : users mouseover the "cloud" of words tossed out by the index to create new combinations with the refined search results showing quickly in the window below.
It is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, an early investor in Skype, and it just launched the English beta version of its application. Update: Quintura has two other VC-backers ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston.
We have not had a lot of time to review the search engine but we did have time for a QandA with the founder, Yakov Sadchikov, an entrpreneur and former advisor to private equity investors that recently sold his RussiaDeal venture capital database business to Euromoney for $500K.
Where is the company based?
Quintura is a U.S. corporation with U.S. offices in Alexandria, Virginia and software development operations in the Moscow region of Russia.
What can you tell us about the Mangrove investment?
I confirm that we raised a significant amount from Mangrove. This is the first ever Western VC investment made into an Internet company out of Russia.
Please describe your application?
Quintura launches its visual Find Engine, giving users the control to find what they are really looking for by using advanced Neural Networking techniques. While viewing the Quintura Cloud, users can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently. Visualization becomes the centre of the user experience, replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings. Users can save and share
their find results, making Quintura the first company to effectively turn the effort of finding into something that can be shared and used by others.In the near future, Quintura plans to launch several specific search clouds where various user communities will be able to visually find relevant information on the Web more easily. Quintura plans to offer blog and web-site publishers the option to create and display the Quintura clouds for their web-sites and related search themes.
What kind of algorithms / tech is being used?
The Quintura technology uses the advanced algorithms of active semantic neural networks. The technology enables Quintura to provide users with a powerful find engine that is much closer to the human natural way of searching and finding information than any of the convenient search engines is.
What is the business model for the company?
We currently formalize our business model since we have just launched our web service. The model is going to be partly based on selling contextual advertisements. We are going to utilize the power of our visual cloud and plan to launch a variety of free and subscription-based web services to user communities and affiliates. It should help them take a full advantage of visual capabilities of Quintura.
Who are the founders?
The founders of Quintura are Yakov Sadchikov (President & Chief Executive Officer), Alexander Ershov (Chief Technology Officer) and Rustam Gafurov (Chief Software Architect). The founders have background in both software development and Internet business.
How does your service stand out compared to competitors (e.g. Google, FAST,
or the others)?
The current web search experience is often very frustrating. It has become virtually impossible for a user to search through a massive amount of search results and easily find relevant information. Quintura brings a whole new perspective to web search by delivering an easy and intuitive approach to find information. It provides users with a visual way to see and refine their searches. Quintura has a unique user interface displaying an
interactive visual cloud of related keywords in addition to a traditional list of search results. While the user refines the search, the results are dynamically updated to match a new search query. Therefore, the Quintura user is able to find the relevant information easier and faster.
Posted on November 2, 2006 08:07 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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