Site Searching Fixed at Exalead

Whatever was causing the problem with the site search for Canada that Gwen noted, I am happy to report that it has been fixed. I received an email from Sébastien Richard at Exalead reporting that all the top level domains should work with the site: prefix now. At least on my tests of site:ca and site:in and a few others, it does seem to be working correctly. Kudos to Exalead for making the fix! I've updated my Exalead review.

One other unique and interesting aspect of Exalead's site: operator, is that it can find any term within the domain. None of the other search engines will find results with a search like site:loc without a top level domain (TLD). In general for site searching, the domain requirements go right to left. In other words, there has to be a TLD at a minimum, and then other portions of the domain can be added from the right. So a search that might be restricted just to pages from legis.state.de.us could use any of the following with increasing precision at any of the main search engines:

• site:us
• site:de.us
• site:state.de.us
• site:legis.state.de.us

Exalead expands a bit on this, although it is buggy. For example, I can search through the Library of Congress sites with site:loc.gov, and I can find pages from the Library of Congress and other domains that have loc as the part of their domain name just below the TLD by using site:loc. This includes results from loc.org, loc.edu, and loc.com. To find just these results, site:loc NOT site:gov works. This can be a quick way to see some pages and sites that have a similar domain. Unfortunately, neither site:legis.state nor site:legis worked with the example above which is why I assume that only terms that fall just below the TLD work in this fashion.

Yes, an inurl: prefix, which is available at Exalead and many other search engines would work in a similar way, but it is less precise. A search using inurl:loc could find www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/ and similar pages with the 'loc' is within a path or file name.

In playing around with these options, I found a minor annoyance. Since Exalead is busy loading screen thumbshots and other graphics while I am typing a new search, once the results page is fully loaded, it refreshes the original search, overwriting my changes that I am typing in. I guess I either need to wait until the page is done loading or at least press the Escape key to make sure that my search does not get overwritten. Turning off the preview thumbshots would probably help as well.

And in one more bit of Exalead news, Gary caught on Friday that Exalead has added an account feature so that preferences and short cuts can be transferred between computers. He also comments on the German version of Exalead. While it defaults to an English interface, at least from the U.S., use the preference to change to the interface language to German, French, Spanish, or Italian. There are also French, Spanish, and Italian versions of Exalead.