Quintura Offers a Search Cloud for Your Site
Search engine Quintura, who offer cloud-based visual searching for the web, have opened a new affiliate program to all comers. Search clouds are somewhat like tag clouds, except that they’re composed of terms that Quintura automatically mines out of the pages that it indexes. As you click on a term, the cloud animates to show related terms, with the relative size of the words showing the number of pages. It turns out to be a pretty decent way to browse through a space of related concepts.
Joining the affiliate program requires working through a signup and bouncing back and forth between email and several browser pages, but once in (it’s free) you end up on your affiliates dashboard site. Here you can tell Quintura your top-level URL so that it can start indexing, customize the visual look of your cloud, and get the HTML to embed it into your web site. This comes in several versions: Flash or JavaScript-based divs for embedding as a sidebar, or a full-size cloud with search results meant to take up an entire page.
Although the clouds are a useful way to get a feel for the contents of a site, as well as to search around it, I had a few problems with the affiliate service as it’s currently rolled out. I was unable to use the affiliates dashboard in either Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, and had to load up a copy of Internet Explorer to get my site into the index. After adding a site, there’s no indication of how long it will take for your cloud to be ready; letting it sit overnight did the trick. Finally, on my WordPress-based blog, I was unable to get either the sidebar JavaScript or full-page JavaScript versions to display, though the Flash version worked fine.
The verdict? Quintura certainly stands to gain if this program spreads, as each embedded widget links back to their site. For site owners and readers, the cloud presents another way to find content, to complement the more traditional date-based and tag-based indexing. But until they get over their teething pains, this will only be a service for those who are willing to bang their heads against the wall a bit in setting things up.
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It’s too big and bulky, and it doesn’t work all that well. That’s my verdict…
I would agree.. the tags it generated were not relevant and it was difficult to navigate.
You can always customize a search cloud on your site as well as its tags. Please get in touch with Quintura affiliate support team. We plan to offer an ad server to monetize keywords in the cloud. As a next step, a search widget will become a monetization vehicle, a much better one than Google ads on your site
Personally, I would leave it to third party plugins that you can install on your blog rather than a third party service to handle tagging. At least that way, you could really style the tag cloud so that it doesn’t become an eye sore of assorted words all over the place.