Quintura recently launched a new widget, a site search cloud for your blog or web site. We are testing the widget on Pandia and had a talk with Yakov Sadchikov, Quintura President and CEO, about the idea behind the widget and what he hopes it will do for his product.

Quintura is an alternative search engine developed in Russia, based on semantic technology. What really makes Quintura stand apart from the crowd, though, is the way they present search results in Web 2.0 style clouds of related search terms that help you narrow or expand your search simply by clicking your mouse.

The Quintura Site Search Widget

Now you can use the same technology to spider and search your site or blog — for free. The site search is displayed as a widget sized cloud of search terms that fits nicely in a sidebar.

If you want to see how it works, we’re testing the search widget on our Pandia Search Engine Detective page. Of course Pandia has had site search from the very beginning back when we started in 1998. But we thought you might enjoy searching Pandia with a new interface. Here is how it works:

When it loads, the widget presents you with a cloud of search terms, words and phrases that are prevalent on your site. On Pandia this means terms like “search”, “news”, “marketing” and more. When you point your mouse to one of the terms, e.g. “news”, the cloud changes and brings up terms related to “news” on Pandia, and you can go on to narrow your search further by clicking and reforming the cloud over and over.

The search results are presented inside the widget as a list of clickable headlines. The default is three headlines, which doesn’t give you much to go on. And headlines without summaries provide little information about the pages in the results. This seems like a drawback.

On full sized Quintura search at their site, this isn’t a problem because there’s plenty of space to present a number of results, summaries included. The widget needs to be small, so it can easily fit into a number of different web designs. If you click “More results” in the widget, you are transported to a full sized page at Quintura.com. This is great for the user, but some web masters will feel they loose their grip on the visitor this way.

Want a widget for your site?

if you want a Quintura Search Widget for your site, you submit a site for indexing, customize the look of the Quintura search cloud. Then you copy the embed code and paste into your site. If you have a large site, allow some days for spidering before the cloud is ready.

There’s a perk for webmasters: By embedding the Quintura search widget on your site or blog, you get your site’s favicon displayed in the search cloud on Quintura.com.

Why a site search widget?

After testing the Quintra site search widget, I’m wondering how this site search differs from other site search solutions. I asked Quintura’s Yakov Sadchikov:

“The visualization that Quintura delivers to site search lends itself very well to site search environment. The web publishers and individual site and blog owners can now expose the depth of their content. We plan to offer an ad server to web publishers in 2008 in order to make it possible to monetize search clouds. In essence, the widget can become an ad network that already consists out of 1,000 sites and blogs that have embedded the search widget. This number is expected to grow to over 10,000 sites by the end of 2008.”

Next I asked Yakov what he is hoping to accomplish by launching the widget. He explained:

“The Quintura search widget will help us meet our long-term goal of beating Google by implementing a medium-term strategy. We are doing this not primarily by building a better search destination site but giving site users a reason not to go to a search engine. With Quintura search widget, Quintura creates an interactive environment on the site or blog where site readers can explore their search interests and meet their information needs from where they are.”