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.

Quintura has just announced that they have reached 8 million unique visitors per month. More than 3 million of Quintura’s unique visitors are from websites in Russia with a focus on women. Quintura’s tag-based search engine technology also is currently being used on sites like Maxim.com and Cosmopolitan.

In a study conducted to determine how many female Internet users were in Russia today, it was determined that there are about 12 million, thus implying that Quintura has a 25% penetration search engine market-share for women in Russia.

In Russia, the number of women using the Internet is growing 20% faster than men. And the amount of advertising spent on women-focused websites in Russia last year was $22 million.

Some of the the women-focused websites in Russia that are utilizing Quintura’s tag-based search engine includes Cosmo.ru, Passion.ru, and MissFit.ru.

Related Link:
1. Quintura Blog

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.

Richman also investigated how different the kid-friendly search engines results were from the more well known search engines (Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) Below is a screen shot of the overall rankings:

Based on the study, it turns out that Quintura Kids returned the most relevant results out of the other competitors, was easier to navigate, and is more visually appealing. While this seems to be reflecting the opinion of Debby Richman, I remember that I produced an article^[2] earlier about why I would have set Quintura for Kids as my child’s homepage, if I had one.

Quintura for Kids takes into account the innocence of children and filters out inappropriate content in a more advanced manner than the other search engines out there.  And it has been proved that kid-friendly content is embraced in the world of Web 2.0 as evidenced by the acquisition of Club Penguin by Disney for $350 million^[3].

[1] SearchEngineWatch: Savvy Little Searchers
[2] Pulse 2.0: Quintura for Kids Now Live
[3] Pulse 2.0: Club Penguin Waddles To Disney’s World For $350 Million

“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

blinkx will provide Quintura users the ability to search within 7 million hours of video content.   “blinkx’s large video index is a perfect compliment to our graphical user interface,” believes Yakov Sadchikov the CEO/Founder of Quintura. “As the Web becomes more visual and rich with content, people are looking for better ways to find video online. blinkx’s video search index combined with Quintura’s visual discovery engine provides users with a unique search experience. This new service has become possible due to technology innovations of our companies in visualizing search and indexing online video.”

What blinkx gets out the deal is traffic referrals from Quintura.  Quintura’s traffic cloud technology also gives other suggested searches that are relevant to the keywords that you asked for.  I tested out the service by just searching for Family Guy after I clicked on the blinkx tab on Quintura’s website.  Here are the results:

Google is not the only search engine that can utilize a partnership with a video website.  The blinkx-Quintura partnership proves that the Google-YouTube partnership has a strong opponent.

This is the same case with Quintura. After analyzing some feedback from users and web experts, Quintura has unleashed a new user interface as of last week. When I first wrote about Quintura on November 15, 2006, there was a lot of space wastage in terms of feature placement. To compare the changes, check out the previous screen shot vs. the up-to-date one.

Previous:

Up-to-Date:

The new interface also features video search powered by Yahoo! Video and product search powered by Amazon.

Dismissive observers of Quintura may say something along the lines of “I wouldn’t switch from Google to use something powered by Yahoo! XML.” I believe those skeptics should keep their eyes peeled on what other services Quintura will unleash though. In December, Quintura unleashed a kid-friendly search engine and now it has an upcoming Quintura for Women service. For the bloggers and website designers, Quintura will also be launching an affiliate program.

I believe that in order for any product be successful, the founder must really passionate about the idea and responsive to constructive criticism. Yakov Sadchikov seems to be the right man for the job.

As shown below, the tag cloud suggests to kids what many other kids are searching for which include “Science” and “Sports.”  When you place the mouse over certain tags, then several other sub-tags are opened as well.

Some of the tags that appeared when I placed the mouse over “Science” included Machines, Magazines, Computer, Museums and Encyclopedia.  You’ll notice that there are several icons spread over the UI that users can click on in the above screenshot that leads the user to certain keywords as well.  The handheld console icon above routes the user to “Games” and the picture of the dog routes the user to “Animals.”

Quintura Kids answers the problem that many other search engines are lacking: Preventing children from accidentally finding themselves among obscene material.  Many search engines have several level of filters to prevent children from discovering obscene material, but generally these filters do not work every time.  If you have a child with their own personal computer and want to take a little precaution, I’d set Quintura Kids as their homepage.

“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.