Intruders

Yakov Sadchikov of Quintura the world’s first visual search engine, recently announced that the company has raised several million dollars worth of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners.

Quintura’s unique selling point is the visual ‘tag cloud’ of related search terms that it adds to normal search results. Yakov believes that this visual representation gives users a much more intuitive search experience. By selecting a keyword from the cloud, users can easily drill down and refine their search results.

Not surprisingly, Quintura’s business model is based on advertising. However what makes them stand out from the crowd is the fact that their advertising is based on images. Instead of serving text ads, like Yahoo and Google do, Quintura feels that advertisers will prefer to use images for their ads that can be displayed in the tag cloud.

Quintura whose core team is based in Moscow, is looking use the funding to grow and aims to give websites and blogs a free way of indexing their content and an easy way of navigating and searching it with Quintura’s tag cloud technology. Yakov Sadchikov also mentioned that Quintura is looking to develop their own search engine to remove their dependency on Yahoo and Google.