Exalead: the french search engine

I read, on lot of blogs, articles telling about one or other new Google's service, and few people seems to know Exalead a search engine from France.

However it's good looking, it shows little images of search results and the search options are very powerful:

• joker symbol *
• logic operator OR AND and NOT
• adjacent words NEAR
• the classic site: to search on a precise website, and link: and inurl:
• and last but not least: regular expressions for computer gurus.

It can search of course in images, but also in videos and in Wikipedia.

The most interesting, according to me, is the search results page: a box allows to precise the results in looking only in blogs or in forums (very useful when we're searching technical information that we generaly find only in forums).

It's possible to narrow your search in showing only results

• in english, french...
• containing some associated terms
• limit to blogs or forum + the sounds, the videos or the RSS feeds
• or filter by document types (PDF, Word...)

Narrow your search

In addition, we can re-search in the results. There is some help. (Some time ago, this little window to precise the search stayed at a fixed height, now I can not obtain this comportment very ergonomic. )

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My opinion as a user: Exalead has a lot of very useful options, but now the big default is the indexation robot frequency on websites. It needs several days, somtimes weeks, before a new page appears in the results. (Actually this blog is not indexed!)
The 2d point is the results relevance. Some progress have been done, but Exalead is far from the leader Google and more from Yahoo/Altavista (my ex-search-engine).

Note: I say "more" because it's a real fact that about politic, particulary american, Google becomes quickly pro-Bush. See Google Watch or others for details. The large domination of Google gives it a great power that it used to influate your destination, that's why I always search elsewhere!

To conclude, I would say a market divided in several actors is always a better for consumers. I can only invite you to test Exalead.

This article was posted the Tuesday 26 February 2008 at 13:39
in the category Software with tags: Internet, Search.
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