The other day, i stumbled upon an article about a Russian search engine, Quintura.
This is remarkable, for two reasons:
- It’s Russian. We don’t hear of a lot of Russian websites or programs over here. Myself, apart from an online bootleg version of the O’Reilly perl books with russian adverts at the bottom, i can’t say i’ve consciously used any Russian-issued content or software. Most russian names in the software world are US citizens.
- The search engine itself is interesting. A bit disorientating at first: definitely a departure from Google’s simplicity (which i like, don’t get me wrong). You type in your research, on the left page your search appears as a tag cloud, and on the right your results. You hover your mouse over the tags, and the search on the right changes, using your tag as an extra search keyword. The keyword you hover over, generates itself a cloud (and then it stops). Very ajax-y.
When i search for something on Google, and i don’t find it, i try different combinations, synonyms, you name it. Quintura does a part of this operation for you. It might even find keywords you didn’t think of. It’s a bit closer to the human way of searching, the way memory is structured around associations. Although i would really like to know how they constructed their taxonomy. Would it be based on search results itself ?
As i understand it, Quintura is a kind of wrapper over the Yahoo search engine. I think it’s most suited to general searches for information, like ‘Long march China’. To be honest, ‘Brussels Washing Machines’ didn’t really yield practical many results. ‘Ruby on Rails’ did slightly better.
Professionally, i use Google to find solutions to practical problems: copy-pasting an exact error message often yields good pointers. Quintura has no added value for this functionality: i tried, and the tag cloud reduced to the exact key words i entered. You can’t have everything.
Biodiversity is a good thing for technical development. I’m glad some people have the guts to shake the status quo, and come up with original ideas – Google is good, but maybe, very maybe, we can do better.