October 2005 Archive

New Look and Size from Exalead

Exalead has had a major facelift, and their claimed size jumped from one to two billion pages (or 1,108,335,695 Oct. 5 to 2,027,698,928). The beta label is gone from the site and from their URL. You can now reach the site at www.exalead.com, and it has the new tag line of "Exalead one:websearch." The search features and display have not changed much, and truncation, proximity, and other specialized search and display features continue to be available. It does seem to be refreshing its database more frequently than it used to, and I hope that continues!

Exalead Desktop Search

Exalead now offers its one:desktop product for, you guessed it, desktop searching. A free version and a commercial version are available. It indexes dozens of file formats including HTML, XML, Microsoft Office, PDFs, compressed archives, multimedia metadata, Flash, WordPerfect, and Outlook/Outlook Express. It includes a sophisticated spelling correction that is based on the actual content of the documents being searched. It even supports the bookmarking of results.

MSN Calculator Does Algebra

As seen on Digg, MSN Search's calculator function can handle differential equations. Enter something like ((122.78+(x^2))/190)=.93 into the MSN Search box and have it solved for x.