Quintura, one of the latest search engines that utilizes tag cloud technology has released a new service that is for the kids called Quintura Kids.  About a month ago, I wrote about how Quintura is partially funded by Mangrove Capital Partners (an early investor of Skype).  Yakov Sadchikov is the co-founder and CEO of Quintura.  The tag cloud allows kids to find results faster and efficiently.

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.

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.