The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim.

The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal.

Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results.

I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they can keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.”