Crenk

Out of Russia comes one of the best alternative search engines in the market today. Quintura provides visual searching via tag clouds in with basic text search results. The service currently pulls its search results from some of the leading search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN, Google and Technorati.

Quintura seems to be quite a basic concept that is still in development, but it seems to be making search a little more visual and fun. Im not totally sure about the idea  and where this product is really headed, mainly because I havent spent enough time using the product, but I can see its benefits. Using the tag cloud can offer quicker searches, different ideas about what to search and also related search possibilities.

Quintura seems to be quite a noval idea and is definitely still a work in progress. They have just recently launched an affiliate program that seems to be an interesting idea, it is based by using one of their search widgets on your site. The program seems to be a different way to get their name about in the marketplace, and im sure it would be worth a try. That all being said I would like to find out more about where the company is heading and what the product is going to evolve into. Quintura.com check it out today.

Everyone seems to be talking about Adobe Air these days. The applications have been really taking off and they seem to so slick in design and functionality. A month or so ago Seesmic made the acquisition of Twhirl, which made Twhirl the first Adobe Air based application to be acquired. Since then Air seems to have become even more popular.

Up until the last few days there has been only one place to find a full list of Adobe Air Applications, and that has been in the Adobe Air marketplace on the Adobe site. However, a new marketplace has launched and it is called FreshAirApps.

FreshAirApps is written on the ExpressionEngine software and really has some great functionality and design. On FreshAirApps applications are showcased and then users can vote for the best applications. Currently, there are only a totally of about 500 applications written on Adobe Air, so the marketplace will be starting off slowly, but will soon pickup speed in the coming months. FreshAirApps also shows users how to implement and install Air apps through the tutorial section.

That all being said Air is easy to install and their are already great applications on the platform, such as eBay, FineTune and NASDAQ applications.

Powerset launches their service with a Wikipedia Search tool. For a long time now Powerset has been ridiculously over hyped and has produced nothing, until now. As I mentioned the search engine is based around Wikipedia at present, but im sure will be moving into other sites in the near future. Powerset allows users to search via topic, phrase or question and it uses its own algorithm to work through key words and find the best matches. Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.

For the last 6 months or more the word around the valley seems to be Semantic. Im simply just sick of hearing about semantic search and how it is going to change the search industry. It seems to be time now for some actual results, so can Powerset provide this?

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

Have a look at who else has been talking about Powerset:

Rev2, Lifehacker, Marketing Pilgrim, VentureBeat, Webware, Inquisitr and Techcrunch.