Quintura wins AltSearchEngine’s Alternative Search Engine of the Year award.

As reported in our article Alternative search engine of the year Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines had nominated 10 search engines for the award.

Among our favorites were Quintura, French Exalead and the Arabic search engine Onkosh.

AltSearchEngines has now declared Quintura the winner.

This is what we said about Quintura:

Quintura is a search engine based on a visual search engine technology and makes use of Yahoo’s index. The visual part is this: When you do a search on Quintura, your search term appears at the center of a cloud — not unlike a tag cloud, but consisting of related search terms, not tags. These related search terms help you narrow your query. It works quite nicely and we like it.

The award is well deserved, so congratulations Quintura!

We believe there are better arguments for giving Quintura the prize than the one given by AltSearchEngines, though:

On Saturday Quintura began their new ad campaign “We are not afraid of Google!� Now that may just be bravado, and I’m sure that all 10 finalists would say that they are not afraid of Google, either, but only Quintura has installed a flashing banner right next to my logo! Like AltSearchEngines, that’s not “anti-Google,� that’s Alternative Search Engine pride, and that’s what resonates most with me.

Tara Calishain over at Researchbuzz had Exalead as her favorite: “Based on the nominees,” she said, “I would say Exalead, hands down.”

Read our review of Quintura.