Exalead

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François Bourdoncle

Exalead [eg'zæli:d] is a French search engine involved in the Quaero project, introducing new search techniques.

Exalead provides thumbnails previews of the target pages along with results, and allows usual advanced refining on the results page (language, geographic location, file type, categories) but also innovative refining such as rich content (audio, video, RSS) and related terms, allowing users to browse the web by serendipity.

[edit] Exalead

The company is a société anonyme based in Paris and founded in 2000 by Francois Bourdoncle. Its name comes from the association between

the prefix exa which means 10¹⁸ (used as a generic term for size, to imply large coverage of pages)
and the verb lead (as the customer is led through the search options)

Exalead tries to integrate research functions in one piece of software, combining Internet, desktop and enterprise functionality.

Exalead employs approximately 60 people in 3 countries (Paris in France, Milano in Italy and New York and San Francisco in the United States of America).

[edit] Exalead.com specific features

Exalead attempts to add value to search results by displaying statistics and information about the results along the left-hand side of the page. This includes categorical and geographical information. Exalead's features include:

Proximity search supporting the NEAR operator
Nested search expressions
Tips
Specific search
- by geographic location
- by language
- by file type.
Additional word suggestions
Phonetic search is also available, which can be used when the orthography is not known
Search within results
Audio, video and RSS search (in the preview also pictures)

Exalead allows search with regular expressions, which can be used to solve crosswords and used in IR algorithms.

On 2^nd March 2006, exalead.com indexed more than 4 billion pages. The interface is available in four languages (English, French, German and Chinese).

On 2^nd August 2006, Exalead launched the beta of its new interface, which is the default interface since the middle of October. The Chinese language has been removed again, Spanish and Italian were added instead - more languages will come soon.

The index size is 8 billion pages (8,079,622,557 pages at 10 October 2006, 15:54 GMT).