Review of Quintura

Last month, TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson did a write up of a new tag cloud search widget called Quintura.

After reading his review, I decided to check it out and give the product a run on Jcyreus dot Com.

The Good: This seems like a neat tool if your blog or website is absent of any real search functionality. When I set up my account, Quintura indexed my site within a few minutes and my widget code was ready to go. If you have the space on your main page, it could be something fun and potentially useful for your visitors. They also have a kid’s version of the Quintura tag cloud, which I figure would be a fun thing for the little ones to play with on age appropriate web sites.

Since the format of my blog doesn’t really allow for a wide enough space on the main [Index] page, I decided to add a page to Jcyreus and call it “ Advanced Search” (this strategy also gave me the ability to track the usage of the tag cloud so that after a few months I would know whether to keep it or scrap it if it wasn’t being utilized by any of my readers).

The Bad: What I’ve found after about 3 weeks of having the extra page on my site is that with tags already listed in a prominent position on my main page as well as a Google web and site search tool in my header, there is very little need for a tertiary utility for searching within Jcyreus.

The Ugly: I’m fairly certain that Quintura is still in the beta testing phase of this product’s release. Considering this, I will chalk up the day that my widget’s text was rendering in the Cyrillic alphabet / Russian language to the newness of the product. They seemed to notice the bug and get it fixed by the next day.

Overall, it seems like they are headed in the right direction and I’ll probably keep the advanced search page around for awhile to see how things continue to develop with Quintura.