First Glimpse: Visual Search from Quintura
I am a real fan of the Visual Thesaurus style of displaying cognitive relationships between terms as a cloud with distance between terms being in some way related to similarity. A great example is liveplasma (formerly musicplasma), which arrays musicians and bands in this way (see illustration).
A few weeks ago (ok, ok, I've been busy), I got email from Yakov Sadchikov, co-founder and CEO of Quintura, a company that has developed technology to array search results (based on Yahoo) in a similar fashion.
You can check out a screen movie of the soon-to-be-released Windows desktop app here, or try the Russion language version of the web application based on the same technology.
The tools supports adding successive search terms -- as in "jaguar" and "panthera" in the example -- to winnow down search results. Looks very interesting.
There doesn't appear to be a social dimension -- explicitly -- in the tool, but we will have to see what follows the initial release.
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