SHALLY’S WAY: Revealing Exalead

Posted on October 19, 2006
Filed Under Shally Steckerl | Leave a Comment

Thursday, October 12, 2006
Shally Steckerl, founder, JobMachine, Inc.

In January of 2005 I brought you my first mention of Exalead then in June 2005 I gave it a bit more thorough treatment, but this French search wonder has been around since October 2004. Sure, I’ve had my eye on it since late in ‘04 and have had many underground conversations with my seeker brethren about it since then, so why bring it to your attention today?

Well they got a makeover. You know how that goes

Improvements are not just aesthetic – like their creative approach of thumbnail previews. They also improved functionality and increased index size to 8 billion. Exalead handles they same typical nested Boolean logic everyone else does, but like Live.com it also handles “optional” keywords with the use of the OPT Boolean similar to the prefered: command in Live search.

But wait, there’s more!

Exalead is capable of proximity search! Wohoo!!! Until now we’ve had to use the pseudo wildcard method on Google to replicate the proximity search that we took for granted on Magellan, HotBot, AOL and AltaVista way back when. With Exalead you can use the simple NEAR operator for locating target keywords located withing 16 places of each other. You can also modify the command with a limiter value. For example use NEAR/10 to indicate words located withing 10 places of each other or use NEAR/50 for words within 50 places of each other.

If you have ever wanted to do a search where you were unsure of the spelling of your keywords, you now have two options. You can use the phonetic spelling field search command “soundslike:” or instead the spelling approximation command “spellslike:” and have a guess at your keyword. You can also find word by their root though the use of either stemming or truncation, or the * wildcard.

Once you get some results you can proceed to refine searches based on categories, but click on the “More choices” button in the refinement box at the right of your search results and you see the breakdown by percentages of keyword categories and even geographic locations!

Oh, one more thing, like Live.com and IceRocket Exalead also supports RSS feeds of search results. Be on the lookout for an Exalead CheatSheet coming soon

Happy CyberSleuthing!
Shally

Checkout accounting jobs, UK at AccountantCareers.co.uk.

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