Exalead

Exalead is a France-based company that is involved in the President Jacques Chirac's initiative to develop Quaero , a European substitute for Google.
From my point of view Exalead is another macro content search engine with old fashioned snippets and I don't see where they take their confidence from when they try to compete with Google which is the best in this macro content field.
Only micro content strategy will help them change the basic rules of the game.
I liked Exalead's wonderful feature of "related terms" that takes you directly to the webpages you need.
I think it’s a big step towards one answer machine.

Here are some excerpts I collected in order to get acquainted with Exalead:

http://www.pandia.com/sew/149-the-multimedia-search-engine-quaero-europe%E2%80%99s-answer-to-google.html
Several companies are involved in the Quaero project along with Thompson. AFP’s article mentions Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, and the search engine Exalead. This is very promising – Exalead has an interface that makes Google look out of date.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001385.html
January 13, 2005
Exalead Searching 1,031,065,733 Web Pages
A while back, Google surpassed the 8 billion mark, and Gigablast Broke 1k the other day. John Battellle reported; Exalead, a company that powers AOL France's search (I was introduced to its founder by Alta Vista founder Louis Monier - yup, he's French) announced today that its stand alone search engine has surpassed the 1-billion-pages-indexed mark. (The engine launched in October)." Louis Monier was on the panel at SES on the search memories session, you can see his picture there, smart, visionary and funny guy.
Gary Price reports that Exalead's Paris-based CEO, Francois Bourdoncle, said "that the company plans to have a two billion page web index online in the near future. He also said that his company is about just ready to introduce a desktop search tool."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1752
Although Exalead’s results are not as relevant as the top search engines, Exalead is doing some interesting things on the presentation side.
Exalead allows users to filter by related search terms, related categories (clustering), web site location (local search), and document type. Users can also restrict results to websites containing links to audio or video content.
All results have a thumbnail of the homepage.
But thats not all Exalead is experimenting with. Clicking on a result loads up the page in a bottom frame with the search terms highlighted on the page. This allows for quick scanning and a fast way to determine if the result is relevant to the initial search. If the page isn’t relevant, users have instant access to the search results.
http://enterprise.amd.com/downloadables/Exalead_ISS_20050713a.pdf
In 2004, the Paris, France-based company wanted to showcase a new international searching service on powerful enterprise-class technology, in the quest to become the No. 1 information-access leader.
Although Exalead started business in 2000, its roots in search engine technology run deeper. Exalead's founders developed the company's dynamic categorization technology while working at the Ecoles des Mines de Paris, one of the top engineering schools in France. Exalead CEO François Bourdoncle and board member Louis Monier were early developers of the AltaVista search engine, and they wanted to build a similar vehicle for the Web.

2. http://searchenginewatch. com/searchday/article. php/3507266 Introducing a New Web Search Contender
These days, web search is dominated by giants, and it's rare to see the emergence of a new potentially world-class search engine. Meet Exalead, a powerful search tool with features not offered by the major search engines.
Exalead is a fairly new search engine from France, introduced in October 2004 and still officially in beta. Having passed the one-billion page mark in 2005, it's still 1/8th the size of Google or Yahoo, but what's a few billion pages among friends? Actually, after a certain point, size really doesn't matter.
The key factors in evaluating a search engine should include timeliness, ability to handle ambiguity, and plenty of power search tools. Exalead does a great job, at least on two of these three criteria.
Exalead is one of the only search engines to allow proximity searching(!), in which the words you search must be within 16 words of each other. (No, you can't tweak the number of intervening words. )
Exalead also lets you use "Regular Expressions," in which you can search for documents with words that match a certain pattern. Imagine, for example, that you're doing a crossword puzzle and have a word of 6 letters, of which the second is T and the sixth is C. By searching /. t. . . c/, you will retrieve sites with the word ATOMIC, perhaps the right word for your puzzle.

3. http://www. pandia. com/sew/110-interesting-exalead-upgrade. html » Interesting Exalead upgrade
The French search engine Exalead has been given fair credit for its advanced search functions, including truncation, proximity search, stemming, phonetic search, language field search. There has now been an interesting upgrade.
Since December 2004 there has been an option letting you add your own links under the search field on the search engine’s home page, giving you the opportunity to turn the Exalead home page into your own portal. Now you may add up till 18 shortcuts of this kind. Hence you may add links to other search engines, making it possible to do your search using other search engines by clicking on the thumbnail appearing under the search form.

4. http://www. erexchange. com/BLOGS/CyberSleuthing?LISTINGID=AFA82E22391841F1B820D26BEB43A351 CyberSleuthing!: Exalead goes full circle | ERE Blog Network
This includes sponsored links by Espotting, and also Exalead Web technology that uses statistical analysis to compare the search terms with the content found in Web pages. When searching for say, "Natacha, hotesse de l'air", the name of a comic strip by Walthיry about an air stewardess, Exalead takes you straight to the site of the artist, grifil. net. The same search with Google gives results overrun with extraneous content.
Exalead the company has been around for 4 years, and the "beta" search was announced so why the sudden news coverage? There is little note worthy news stories about Exalead prior to May 20th of this year.