Learning to search the web can be frustrating for children. One simple spelling mistake is all it takes to make a search query useless. Plus, most search engines don't help the user find related information, so they cannot quickly and easily hone their search to find exactly what they're looking for.

Quintura is a search engine that we have discussed previously here, and here. Most recently, they've introduced a beta product called Quintura for Kids, which aims to make searching easier for children. It sports a friendly theme and a few baked-in kid-friendly default searches. Otherwise, in terms of functionality it is very similar to the standard version of Quintura.

In my mind if you're going to market a product to children, it's pretty important to include content safeguards. For example, Google has a setting called "family filter" that attempts to protect young eyes from the impurities of the internet. In Quintura for Kids, I tried a search for the word "Sex", and the related words the search returned included "nudity" and "violence". That made me nervous, but it turned out that the search results shown were heavily filtered and nothing offensive was visible. Kudos! More kid-friendly searches like "Train" or "car" returned tons of interesting options, while interestingly zero results were returned for "nude" and for "Google". The Google one cracked me up.

Hopefully Quintura for Kids will soon be brought out of beta, and have the theme updated, as the holiday theme is maybe a little out of date.

We first reported on visual search client Quintura back in January, and although we were impressed with the polish and design of the application, we had two reservations about it. Firstly, it was a standalone application to perform web searching, which felt counter-intuitive, and although it's designed to give users a visual interface to more quickly compose search queries, it was simply too slow to claim that it was speeding up web searching.

Well here we are, 11 months later, and both of those concerns have been addressed by the new online version of Quintura. Gone are the swoopy moving words, replaced by a very simple and quick user interface right on the Quintura home page.

So if you find composing accurate search queries difficult, or if you enjoy the serendipity of seeing related terms show up as you search, give Quintura a try.