By Lars Iselid

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.

The size of the index has doubled to 2 billion pages, which brings it more or less up to the same size as Gigablast. That being said, whether it contains 1 or 2 billion pages is not of great importance. Its ability to fetch relevant search results is.

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.

In Exalead’s help section under “Miscellaneous” and the Smart bookmarks category, you will find an introduction to this feature.

There are several other features at Exalead well worth testing.

The help section tells you about Keyboard shortcuts which makes it easier to navigate the search engine result pages. By hitting Enter or clicking on the search result (not the link, mind you!) you will get a small preview window showing you the relevant web page. You can close the preview window by hitting ESC or Enter.

The same function can actually be found in the Clusty metasearch engine. Brainboost and WiseNut also used to have a feature like this one.

You can use the space bar to navigate from search engine result to search engine result, and Shift-space to move back.

In the search engine result page left hand column you will find a list of related search queries, related categories (fetched from the Open Directory/Dmoz.org) and Dmoz web sites sorted by country. Below links are sorted according to document type, including Power Point, PDF and Flash, but no other sound or video formats.

You may, however, limit your search to video or audio by using buttons found near the top of the result page. There you will also find an RSS button, which brings up relevant RSS feeds from the pages listed.

The default result display includes a thumbnail showing the web page. This is a feature similar to the Thumbshots found in the Open Directory and the Firefox add on GooglePreview. You use buttons found in the upper right side to decide whether you will have text only, text with thumbnails or thumbnails with short text snippets.

The increase of the index proves that Exalead’s ambition is to compete in the big search engine league. Moreover, their advanced search functions means that we no longer miss the advanced search functions of AltaVista, truncation and proximity search included.

It should also be noted that Exalead has launched its own desktop search software, called Exalead One Desktop

This article was originally published as Exalead uppgraderar

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine
Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.