Quintura - Search & Find couldn’t get any more interesting?!

How can anyone not write about this search engine? It's user experience really stands apart if you ask me personally. Nope I am not starting any Google bashing session here. To tell you the truth, I still use Google the most. But then something inside all of us always wants to test out the new search engine out there. Well it is this urge that led me to this russian aritifical intelligence based search engine Quintura. What I find interesting about Quintura is it's visual representation of search results. Searching hasn't been so much fun before. Quintura basically displays your search results in two ways. On the left side you see a visual cloud with your search keyword in the middle surrounded by other terms related to your keyword in the some way or the other. And on the right you will see the search results as any other search engine gives us. Now for the stuff that really stands out. To describe that better I would like to do a search on the Quintura and show you.

For example, on typing 'Knowledge Management' on the visual cloud you will various words like information, strategies, portal, technology, knowledge, management etc as separate terms but one has an option to cancel a term from this cloud and this ensures the search results also change accordingly. I can also add a term in this cloud by double clicking anywhere on the cloud and typing in what I want and see the cloud and search results change accordingly. Does this sound cool or what? Also one can narrow down the results by cancelling out terms which one feels is not important for the information he is seeking.

On the whole it is a great search engine, both when an information seeker is looking for exhaustive and specific information. When exhaustive, one can look at all the related terms on cloud and when specific cancel out not so related terms to narrow down your search.

Can the miracle enterprise search engine please stand up?

The success of search engines on the internet in helping one find information makes us wish for similar results inside the enterprise too. This need has been understood by the search engine companies and they have all tried coming out with their perfect solution for enterprise search. Many organizations have taken the plunge in implementing enterprise search engines expecting a substantial improvement in the getting the knowledge that their employees are looking for. But then the results haven't been all that impressive. One reason that I could think of us is that a Google or any search engine on the internet is not the same as Google or any search engine inside the enterprise. In the internet the search engine actually has access to a huge amount of content from which the chances that its crawlers or bots will find the information that a searcher is looking for is quiet high. While at the same time in the enterprise, the search engine on traditional KM systems which basically consists of a content management system with portals on them, the search results pulled up basically are dependent on the content captured in the CMS in the first place. Of course I agree I have been guilty of simplifying the description of a KM system in an enterprise to a alarming strip bare level. But what I want to bring out here is that search engine results are only as good as the quality of content captured in our databases. Also with the emergence of newer collaboration tools in an organization, it is not longer the CMS system that is the only database for knowledge. The enterprise search has to search through chats, forums, blogs, traditional databases and multiple other systems to bring out the iformation that a user is looking for. But I agree the importance of a well tuned enterprise search in an organization cannot be undermined. The complexity of the information being generated and used in an organization is very high. The expectations therefore, from the search engine, are certainly steep. But it would be grossly unfair from our side to judge the performance of enterprise search only through its achievements so far. There is still a long way to go in this area. The good part of this of course is that big players are looking at enterprise space as an important area of growth in the near future. Investments by these large players on this space will finally help the consumer of this development, which is basically the employee of an organization, benefit from the output of this search by being able to better find what he is looking for in an organization. All this will bring us back to the question of whether organizations should only focus its efforts in identifying the right search engine, implement it and tune it better or shouldn't it also look at what kind of knowledge is being created in an organization and ensure proper processes are in place to better help create quality knowledge objects and have better content management in place. The thin line between quantity and quality of knowledge is sometime too thin to be noticed!