Quintura, the popular tag-based semantic search engine that offers search, analytics, and monetization services for web publishers and other content owners has received additional funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. This funding is part of a bridge funding round.

With this round of funding, Quintura will scale it’s site search platform from 8 million to 50 million by the end of 2009. Quintura also plans to bring in additional venture capital investors.

As part of the announcement, Quintura ave also hired Dennis Szerszen as the Chief Marketing Officer. Dennis used to be SVP of Marketing and Corporate Development at SecureWave.

Quintura currently powers the site search for ReadWriteWeb, Maxim.com, Cosmo.ru, Passio.ru, ComputerBild, Russian Newsweek, Hilary Magazine, and several others. Quintura Site Search is also being added to several other major U.S.-based major men’s lifestyle websites.

Mangrove Capital Partners also participated in Quintura’s first round of funding.

WooMe is a video dating social network that allows users to communicate on webcams. One of the features that makes WooMe popular is Woo Sessions. Woo Sessions are basically webcam video chatrooms. WooMe calls themselves an “introduction platform” according to VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.

WooMe raised a second round of funding at $12.5 million led by Index Ventures, Atomico, and Mangrove Capital Partners. This brings WooMe’s total funding to $16.9 and now they are valuated at $41 million.

In terms of users, the company say that they have roughly 350,000 users and has 15,000 sessions per day. WooMe hopes to raise about another $500,000 in this round from “strategic angels.” WooMe started in December 2006.

“Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts’ estimates. That means the company’s success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last.”
-David H. Freeman, Newsweek

Tui Stark, a photography stylist recently attempted to search for “snorkeling beaches blue water,” but searching for those keywords on Google turned out to be futile.  Results that Google found included web sites about real-estate companies, rafting apparel, and listings for scuba diving, slightly irrelevant from the searches keywords. [Source: NewsWeek]. 

In my opinion, is Google overvalued?  For the amount that their stock is trading today and how much their company is appealing competition to enter the market, they’re not too far away from becoming the next Yahoo! by becoming overshadowed by the next big thing.  And one of the most valiant efforts made by a company to take on Google today is Quintura. 

Quintura has stayed consistent in pushing their tag searching technology and have never strayed from it.  Quintura has a kid-friendly search engine that filters out inappropriate content and most recently added a Halloween themed search homepage:

I challenge Pulse 2.0 readers to test out Quintura and leave any feedback for the company.  I believe that users will find that the only problem that they have is that Quintura is not like Google.  Keep an open-mind because I’m sure Quintura is here to stay.  The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.

Quintura[1], a visual search engine company that has won numerous awards for alternative search engines by various sources, has raised additional funding. Over the past few months, Quintura has unleashed a partnership with Blinkx[2] and created Quintura for Kids[3].

“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,” stated Yakov Sadchikov, the co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We plan to use the capital to scale the Quintura affiliate model for site search and build a semantic web index using our neural networking techniques.”

Major search engines are starting to become vulnerable. Yahoo!’s CEO resigned and the company is still finding ways to prevent flustering. Google is monopolizing the search market and their corporate “don’t be evil” policies seems to be diminishing as the company tracks user activity through products such as Search History. People are finding it difficult to distinguish the difference between MSN and Live. And Ask.com is depending on creative marketing to retain market-share. This is the perfect time for alternative search engines to innovate.

Upcoming products from Quintura includes Quintura for Women and an API that will allow users to embed a search engine with Quintura’s tag cloud search to replace site maps.  Quintura’s tag cloud search idea is unique and innovative.  However, the homepage could probably use a redesign.

The homepage is the glue that keeps users sticking to the site. Today, Google.com looks like Live.com which looks like Ask.com.  MSN looks like Yahoo!, which looks like AOL.com.  We need something different!  Quintura is off to a great start.

[1] Quintura.com
[2] Pulse 2.0: Quintura and Blinkx Team Up On Visual Video Search
[3] Pulse 2.0: Quintura for Kids Now Live

For the past couple months, I’ve been covering Quintura, a search engine that utilizes tag clouds and was backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (an early investor in Skype).  Properazzi, a new property search engine has launched and is also funded by Mangrove.  Properazzi has 1.8 million properties listed in 45 different European countries.

The idea behind the site is to get a general understanding of real estate and potentially purchase property in the selected European countries.  You can set your minimum and maximum prices in 92 different currencies and also search within the country or city for property that is on sale or for rent.  As a test, I searched for property that has swimming pools in London:

The result was that properties in London with swimming pools were found and listed in the screen shot above.  Another feature in the website is the ability to set the distance range in which you want property listings to be searched using the radar.  The radius is set in kilometers.  The map in which you set the radius is powered by a Google Maps API. 

After the property listings are generated, you can filter through it by relevance to the keywords inputted, newest properties added, lowest priced, and highest priced.  There is also a property type filter selection option so you can sort out houses, plots, bungalows, apartments, townhouses, etc.  Once you click on the links associated with the property, you will be redirected to the website that contains the property information and can always return to the previous results because a Properazzi frame remains.

What makes this Properazzi’s investment so interesting is that it is unchartered territory.  I have not heard of any other investment company funding websites that focus on European real estate.  With the advantage of being first-to-market, I believe Properazzi has lots of potential.  I heard about Properazzi from Tom Dibaja, Outreach Specialist of Properazzi.

Quintura, an up and coming search engine is now backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that is proved to be visionary investors by providing initial investments into Skype. Quintura’s See & Findâ„¢ search technology utilizes tag clouds in addition to search results. The algorithms surrounding Quintura has been developed over the course of several years through Quintura’s U.S. and Russia-based engineers.

“Our team approached the problem of finding Internet-based information and entertainment from the standpoint of the user” stated Yakov Sadchikov, the co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We strived to build something that made it as easy as possible for the user to find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. We also wanted to make the user experience very visual and more enjoyable, so we built in visual navigation technologies that are more appealing to users.”

Yesterday the investment announcement was made. The total investment is undisclosed. ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston were also involved in this round of investment into Quintura.

“We have found the team of Mangrove being a visionary investor and very intelligent partner in developing our consumer driven Internet business.” said Yakov Sadchikov, co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We plan using the venture capital to take the Web by storm and reach millions of web users globally when launching the Quintura visual find engines for various user communities. We are also starting an affiliate program for most popular web-sites and blogs such as Digg, Netscape, and others where they can easily make their current tag clouds very interactive.”

Although the Quintura search results are created by Yahoo! XML, the user interface, the tag cloud feature, and the Save It! and Share It! features are unheard of anywhere else. By surrounding the search keywords with other relevant keywords from the Meta tags in the search results, users can optimize their search engine experience.

Here is a sample screenshot of a search on “Bill Gates”:

Notice the accuracy of the tag cloud? Words such as “chairman,” “microsoft,” “melinda,” and “foundation” have been other suggested searches in the cloud. Investment in such a company proves that search engine technology is becoming a booming market once again and the next Google could be right in front of us.

Quintura, Inc. is a U.S. corporation with offices setup in Alexandria, Virginia. Quintura’s software development operations are based in a region of Moscow in Russia. Quintura is planning on offering blog and web publishers an affiliate program to display Quintura clouds on their websites in the near future. The Qunitura team has a blog and has also announced that they have an image visual search as well at http://www.quintura.ru/. On August 2006, Business 2.0 featured Quintura as one of the world’s hottest startups.