People Search Digest

Poor Yahoo.

As if dealing with testy shareholders, political intrigue, and departing executives wasn’t enough for the foundering company, it just got, like, totally dissed by Maxim Magazine. You know Maxim - that mag for post-adolescent, collar-popping guys everywhere. They’ve ditched Yahoo’s search engine in favor of Quintura’s semantic tag cloud search, which creates a tag cloud above the results. Users can refine the search by clicking various tags.

Remember when we talked up Quintura a few months back? The attractive new search engine had tons of potential, but was just launching its beta and still needed some supporters.

Quintura may have just replaced Yahoo as the primary search engine for Maxim.com; we’re just not totally convinced. The cloud is certainly attractive, and it can be useful, but refining the searches takes longer than pulling up Yahoo’s search results. Plus, final results through Quintura don’t seem markedly superior to Yahoo’s. From Maxim’s perspective, however, that just means searchers will spend even more time on their sites looking around, and more exposure is always a good thing.

Even for mags like Maxim.

By Erik C.