I pity the poor new entry in the search engine space. How do you possibly stake out new territory in the hottest online space there is? How do you avoid being swept away in the tidal wave of momentum that is going to the industry leaders, Google, Yahoo and MSN? How do you attract enough users to gain a critical mass? Well, you have to offer something different.
A new desktop search tool, Quintura, is betting that a new user interface based on the concept of semantic mapping is just the ticket they need to win the search lottery. And if semantic mapping sounds familiar, it should. I've been talking about semantic mapping for almost 2 years now. It's a powerful concept in understanding how people search and something we identified in our previous research. But when it comes to building a new user interface around it, I'm not sure Quintura's implementation will be taken up by the search masses.