Exalead - new advanced search engine joins the party

A new European search engine has appeared, and it may ultimately become a major world player. Welcome Exalead, everybody!

By Lars Våge

(November 2 2004) Recently there has appeared a new global search engine index from the French company Exalead.

It has been available at AOL France since that portal stopped showing Google results.

Now a beta version is out, indexing not only French pages, but the entire Web. At the moment the index contains some 450 million pages, but the goal is to reach one billion shortly. [Exalead now claims to have reached that goal -- the editor].

So what can Exalead offer that you can't find in e.g. Google? Quite a bit, it turns out. Let's start out with functions that no other major search engine offers:

Proximity: You can do proximity search using the NEAR operator (which was supported by Altavista earlier).

Truncation: Using the asterisk (*) as a wild card sign you can find several versions of the same word in one search (open* gives you results that include both open, opened, opens, and opening)

Phonetic search: By activating this function the search engine will bring up words that sound like the word you type in, even if you misspell it.

Regular search patterns: These are similar to search expressions that used in programming languages like PHP and Perl. We do not know of any other major search engine that has ever supported this feature.

This is not bad at all, but it doesn't end there. Exalead also includes other features that exist in other search engines, but that are not widely used:

Automatic stemming: You may activate stemming to automatically expand your search to include both the singular and plural forms of nouns as well as verb conjugations (MSN supports stemming today, but will it last?).

Sort by date: You may chose to rank your result by date -- newest or oldest results first.

Date search: You may search for documents saved or modified before or after a certain date (e.g. search term >= 2004/09/01).

Search results with thumbnails: You may ask to get small "snapshots" of the relevant web pages together with the search engine result listings. These thumbnails are produced by Exalead, not Thumbshots.

Furthermore, all important document formats are being indexed. In addition to HTML, Exalead indexes World, Excel, Powerpoint, and Rich Text Format files as well as regular text documents.

Navigating the search results is made easy and you can switch between modes showing text, text and thumbnails of just thumbnails(!). Clicking on a thumbnail opens the web page in a preview window on the right hand side of the screen. Your search term is highlighted and you can jump easily between the different instances. This works even for PDF and Word files.

Your search results also list related search terms and related categories in the Open Directory and you may sort by country or by document type.

Exalead does not yet seem to support special characters like the Scandinavian å, ö, ä. Except from this, Exalead is like a virtual party if you, like me, enjoy advanced search engines.

If you do not want to use all the special features, Exalead works well as a regular search engine.

You might want to read VeriTest "pertinence relevance test" of AOL France, compared to Google from September 2004. [PDF]

Exalead on the new global search engine index.

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