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.”

Quintura, a site where you can search the internet with the assistance of a keyword cloud, is releasing a widget that brings the same search cloud to individual websites.

Site owners can install the widget (shown below) and the search results will come only from their sites, or from a network of sites if they so choose. Search advertisements will show up in the cloud, and proceeds from click-throughs to those advertisements will be split with site owners.

If you’re interested in trying it out on your site, you can sign up here and Quintura will begin indexing your site and/or RSS feed. The cloud is customizable and so easily embeddable that visitors to your site will have the opportunity to embed the cloud for your site on their own.

As you can see below, the widget’s struggling a bit to search TechCrunch very effectively. It seems to generate a lot of results for tag pages, not actual articles, which isn’t terribly helpful. In my testing, the widget also loads only partially sometimes, which prevents the results themselves from actually showing.

var so = new SWFObject(“http://affiliates.quintura.com/flash/quintura.swf?refresh=0&partnerId=600&partnerTopic=TechCrunch&partnerURL=http%3A//www.techcrunch.com/&engine=http://affiliates.quintura.com&lng=en”,”mymovie”,”570″,”400″,”7″,”#FFFFFF”);so.addParam(“engine”, “http://affiliates.quintura.com” );so.addParam(“partnerId”,”600″);so.addParam(“partnerTopic”,”TechCrunch”);so.addParam(“firstRequest”, “”);so.addParam(“partnerURL”, “http://www.techcrunch.com/”);so.write(“EmbedFlashPreview”);

The capital will be used to scale the Quintura affiliate model for site search and build a semantic web index using Quintura’s “neural networking techniques”.

Quintura displays an interactive search cloud of related keywords and phrases to refine and narrow down searches.

The Quintura affiliate program will involve site owners placing the Quintura search cloud on their site with a revenue share model based on paid search placement.

Michael Arrington previously described the site in positive terms writing that he found Quintura “to be useful for research or browsing based search where I am trying to find more information on a given topic”; it’s definitely one of the better offerings amongst the army of new Web 2.0 search engines.

The company, which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype, AllPeers, Piczo, Nimbuzz) and OpenView Venture Partners, has developed technology that clusters related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as a tag cloud. Users can refine their searches by clicking on any word in the cloud – words that are closer and bigger than other words are more correlated to the initial query than other terms. Mousing over any word in the cloud shows related terms to that as well.

The company wisely moved away from a downloadable search application last year to a pure online service. The new interface moves the tag cloud to the left and search results to the right – previously the search results were below the cloud and seemed somewhat crowded.The site also has decent image and video search, and child-safe search.

If I’m looking for a specific website, Google or Yahoo is perfect. Like Clusty, I find Quintura to be useful for research or browsing based search where I am trying to find more information on a given topic. After testing it, I find that I’ve been back a few times to use the service.