Here’s a good survey of Exalead by Guest Author Phil Bradley.

Back in September 2006 my colleague, the Librarian in Black wrote an excellent article entitled Ten Reasons Librarians Should Use Ask.com Instead of Google Given the recent news about Ask, I thought I’d revisit this idea only this time I’m going to focus on Exalead. My apologies in advance to Sarah for basing some of the following on her original work.

1. Exalead has excellent functionality when it comes to focusing down on a search. The ‘narrow your search’ option lets users limit/exclude terms, blogs, forum, multimedia, languages (and it gives you an indication which languages are important with respect to a search term). There’s a directory function, at least 8 different ways to limit by file type (again with a percentage figure for the number of results you’ll get) and a really good geographic location option which includes both countries and importantly entire regions. There’s also a very helpful little ’search within results’ box too.

2. Like Ask, Exalead clearly indicates what links are sponsored, but unlike Ask I don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of advertising I’m faced with.

3. Image search is excellent - not just for the number and relevancy of the images, but the sheer range of options to narrow searches - by size, content, wallpapers, colour, layout and file types. I would like more in the way of related terms as well, but that’s a minor point.

4. The preview option allows me to view the page directly from the Exalead screen. Importantly this is a large preview - no peering at a tiny image on the screen - it’s certainly clear enough to view perfectly easily. To be fair, Ask has done some work in this area recently and their statistics function is excellent (both being better than Google’s offering which doesn’t exist). In fact, I have three different presentation options with Exalead - text only, text and images or text, images and other information.

5. View recent results. There are times when I don’t want the old information - I just want the new stuff. A single click gets that to me without any fuss. In fact, this functionality is excellent since I can narrow down even further (by using the advanced search screen options) to very precise specific date ranges.

6. Video search is also good, and once again I can narrow by source or length. Importantly I can resort my results by relevance, most recent, oldest, most rated, viewed etc. Why is this an area that so many search engines ignore? We’d all get on a lot better if they spent a bit of time working out ways that searchers could simply reorder the information that they are presented with; so much more attractive than some of the social search engines that are around these days.

7. Exalead allows users to create their own set of shortcuts which appear on the home page. It’s a useful feature and a good way to bring certain sites to the attention of users.

8. There’s a good feedback option. This in and of itself doesn’t mean a great deal, but what it does do is to illustrate that they are a company that listens to their users and addresses their concerns, rather than shutting up shop on librarians when they bored listening to them. These people actually want to do something different. Their blog is also worth reading, with interesting things in it.

9. It’s European. Again, no particular reason why this should appeal to librarians (especially not American ones!), but it’s nice to see an alternative to Silicon Valley.

10. The advanced search functionality. I’ve left this until last because it’s the most important. You can run phonetic searches, proximity searches, specific language searches (and boy! do these people have a lot of alternatives), a title search, link searches, search by date, a prefix search, site search, exact words or phrases, optional terms, proper Boolean logic with parentheses as well, and regular expressions for things like character repetition, ‘or’ options, single character options and so on. The example they give is /mpg(1|2|3)?/ which is very neat.

It’s a search engine for people who like search engines, and it’s an engine for librarians.
If you’ve not used it, I’d strongly recommend giving it a whirl next ‘Google Free Day’.

Editor’s note: Phil and I are planning a Google Free Day on April 1st.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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