Quintura has raised several millions US dollars in Series A funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. The company will launch an affiliate program and add tag cloud advertising.

“Since our first meeting in spring 2006, we have really enjoyed working with the team of Mangrove Capital on our challenge to beat Google. We came to a mutual decision on raising new funding entirely from Mangrove.� says Yakov Sadchikov, co-founder and CEO of Quintura.

“We plan using the capital to scale the Quintura affiliate model for site search and build a semantic web index using our neural networking techniques.�

Tag cloud searching

Quintura is based on what they call “natural associative search principles”. The result is a truly innovative search engine interface.

When you do a search on Quintura the left half of the browser window is filled with a tag cloud of terms. Your search term is at the center of the cloud surrounded by related terms that can help you narrow your query.

The font size of the terms indicates how relevant and important Quintura considers the word or phrase.

If one or these terms will add accuracy to your search, you click it. You then watch as it floats towards the center of the cloud to join your query.

The new funding will make it possible for Quintura to develop this concept further.

Note that Quintura is making use of the Yahoo! search index; it does not spider the Web on its own. You can also use it to search for images, videos and Amazon products.

Selling ads

Quintura now plans to start selling graphical advertisements such as images, logos, and icons within the Quintura search cloud.

It will also offer an affiliate model for web-sites and blogs to replace a site map with a Quintura interactive cloud for site search and navigation.

The web-site publisher can index the site content and display the Quintura cloud on its site. The affiliate model will be either free/ads-supported or subscription-based.

More at Pandia:
Quintura Search beta
Quintura for Kids
Quintura’s online visual search engine

Quintura company site.