Exalead Category Archive
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.
New Exalead Interface Launches
Exalead has launched its new interface that has been in beta and preview mode for the past month or so. They also report indexing over 8 billion pages (they had initially stated they would meet that goal in the summer, so they are not too far behind schedule). Exalead Review has been updated.
Specify Exalead Proximity
Gary reports on an undocumented feature at Exalead that he learned from Karen Blakeman and confirmed with Exalead the NEAR proximity operator (meaning 16 word proximity) can be made to specify other levels of proximity. Use NEAR/x (where the 'x' is a number you chose) to find the two words within 'x' proximity. At last, real proximity searching is available on a Web search engine!
New Relevancy Study
Danny has a summary of a French relevancy study which compares Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Exalead, Voila, and Dir.com. By one measure (best relevance of top five results), Google and Yahoo! tie for top relevancy scores. Using a different measure (at least one good result in top five), Yahoo! beats Google by a bit with MSN and Exalead not very far behind.
Exalead Doubles Again: 4 Billion
Not too many months after Exalead launched out of beta and jumped from covering 1 billion pages to 2 billion, they have now doubled yet again to over 4 billion. The company press release credits the use of 64-bit indexing technology and predicts reaching 8 billion by July 2006.
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.
Exalead Review Added
A preliminary review of the search features of Exalead has been posted. I also updated the Search Engine Features Chart with the new MSN Search and Exalead included.
Exalead Claims 1 Billion
The new search engine Exalead now claims over a billion pages indexed. According to Gary's post, they plan to get to two billion in the near future and introduce a desktop search tool as well.
New Engine: Exalead Beta
From France comes a fascinating new search engine known as Exalead. Gary Price has many details in his SEW Blog post. Key search features include truncation, proximity, and some nice sorting of results. This is one to watch.
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