Quaero: search yields trouble

Do you remember when French President Chirac launched an initiative to build a European search engine to compete with Google? YAGIDF = Yet Another Government Initiative Destined to Fail. A little more than a year later, it does seem that Quaero found trouble while searching for an architecture for the future of search: I clipmarked here a piece of news that I found on Slashdot today. And have you tried "www.quaero.com" or "www.quaero.org"? What's a search engine that needs another search engine to be found by a user worth? How about a new product that does not have a web presence before it's completemy developed? Passé? Perhaps it is time for European governments to change the ways in which they try to support European entrepreneurship and crucially time to stop having dreams of European grandeur, come back to Earth and act realistically... Shimon Peres stated that governments are becoming irrelevant in December at Le Web 3. Quaero might be a good example.
Meanwhile Google presses on and continues to let a thousand flowers bloom in a process of continuous innovation. At the same time I know Mangrove Capital and Mark Tluszcz who have been eager to do something in the search engine space since late 2005 (go to this site, search for "Tluszcz" and watch this video - sorry but v-pod.tv does not support linking to videos or embedding it appears.) seem to be betting on Quintura, an interesting search engine that uses artificial intelligence to interconnect concepts that the user is looking for. I saw a presentation of theirs at Le Web 3 and tested the platform: it's quite good although there are a couple of bugs with the nice flash representation of concepts (last time I checked it did not update when the user hit the Back button of the Firefox 2.0 browser).

Comments

[Yakov]

Happy New Year, Alex!
I thought that you may be interested to check Quintura for Kids at http://kids.quintura.com
It's a visual search engine designed specifically for children.
We are shortly going to launch an affiliate program for web-sites/blogs when one should be able to create an interactive tag cloud for easy navigation via the site and for web search. Stay tuned to our developments!

[alex Papanastassiou]

Happy New Year to You, Yakov and to Quintura!

Quintura for Kids looks good and it does seem to do a very decent job at filtering out content I would not want kids to access: I tried searches for violent sites, guns, sex services and none seems to give access to stuff that would be plain wrong for non-adults. So great job there!

I am quite curious to see what your affiliate program will look like.