Each month, Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines blog publishes a list of 100 top alternative search engines. However, now he has gone one step further and named an overall winner from a shortlist of ten. The ten alternative search engines to make the shortlist were Aftervote, Answers.com, Dialogus, Exalead, GoshMe, KartOO, KoolTorch, Omgili, Onkosh and Quintura.
To decide the winner, AltSearchEngines blog invited votes from readers while search engines were also judged on their innovation, search term relevance, popularity and a host of other factors. The ultimate winner was Quintura, a visual search engine which makes use of Yahoo!'s index and displays results at the centre of a cloud - not dissimilar to a tag cloud, but consisting of related search terms instead of tags.
The premise of Quintura is that the related search terms within the cloud should help users narrow their search query. While viewing the Quintura Cloud, users can also visually navigate and refine their search in order to find the most relevant information for their search faster and more efficiently. When a user selects a search term within the Cloud, the most relevant results for that search term are displayed.
Quintura was named one of PC Magazine's Top 25 websites in June and at the beginning of December launched a new advertising campaign that makes a bold claim: "We are not afraid of Google". And while Google may not feel threatened by Quintura's stature, the search engine can take pride in that it has been well-received by many as an effective alternative to the 'big 3'.
