Round up your friends, your family, your coworkers, the mailman, your dog Spot…The finish line is in view and Exalead is ahead of the pack, but the race is far from over.

Vote, vote vote for Exalead as your favorite alternative search engine!

QUAERO officially launched March 17. For those who missed our earlier post, Quaero is an advanced R&D program focused on the analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content for professionals and consumers. This 5-year, collaborative initiative includes 24 industry and university partners, with a total budget of approximately 200 million euros (99 million in public financing from France matched by an equal contribution from project participants).

Centered around technologies for the automated treatment of text, speech, music, images and video, Quaero seeks to develop new ways of addressing information access challenges in the face of the digital revolution. The effort revolves around five axes including the digitization and enrichment of content for libraries and publishers; personalized, multi-device distribution of video; better targeting for advertising; and multimedia search for the Web via the Exalead search engine.

Quaero represents a “unique opportunity” for small French companies to advance technologies in these fields even though they do not have access to the extensive R&D resources of giants like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, states François Bourdoncle, co-founder of Exalead.

 

The search engine market is a tough one.

Ask.com, the search engine from the American group IAC/InteractiveCorp, is abandoning its general Web search engine strategy in favor of vertical search focused on specific demographic groups (such as the Rushmore Drive engine that seeks to prioritize content for an African-American audience).

This reorientation is accompanied by a restructuring plan encompassing the layoff of 8% of the Ask.com workforce and the departure of Gary Price, a search guru who joined ask in order to bring innovation to the heart of the Ask engine.

We can’t let this event pass without pausing to salute the creativity of the Ask team, as evidenced by products such as Ask3D, which offered some interesting new functionalities for users. Our best wishes for the future for all the Ask crew…

It’s also a moment for us here at Exalead to reflect on the disquieting reduction in the number of general Web search engines over the past few years, particularly as the stakes for free, open and universal access to information continue to escalate.

The role of challenger in this domain is important. It is to continue to innovate, to continue to seek of new ways of solving old problems, to continue to imagine novel ways of accessing and navigating the world’s burgeoning information stores, and it is the duty of the challenger to keep pressure on market leaders without ceasing to interrogate its own vision. For, in a world where diversity is fading, innovation left in the hands of a sole actor will cease to exist.

At Exalead, we are committed to doing our part by keeping up a flow of innovations for the public, like searching by associated terms (at www.exalead.com since 2001), thumbnail previews for results, face filtering for image searches (a market first released a month ahead of Google), and many others to come…

So a little message to those who support us: we’re committed long-term to challenging the status quo within the search engine world. Spread the word.

Tired of scrolling through endless sales pitches when looking for hard information on the Internet? Or, do you sometimes want to cut to the chase and shop, shop, shop? Exalead has a new feature made just for you.

The new “commercial” filter, available on the search results page under the “Site type” in the “Narrow your search” panel, lets you sort your search results by their “Commercial” or “Non commercial” nature. Click “Commercial” to bring commercial results to the top of the list, pushing non-commercial results to the bottom of the result set. Do the reverse with “Non-Commercial” to relegate commerce-related results to the bottom of the heap.

This refinement, together with all the other options available in the “Narrow your search” panel, makes it easier than ever to find exactly the content you’ve been seeking—fast!

Each month on his blog AltSearchEngines.com, Charles Knight (whom we’ve spoken about before) selects one candidate as his Alternative Search Engine of the Month. Now, he’s handing the ballot box over to YOU to select the Search Engine of The Year.

Just go to The Search Race and sign up for a free Search Race account. You can cast a ballot for as many search engines as like, but you can only vote once for your favorite engine (like…ahem, EXALEAD). He also invites balloteers to submit an engine if he’s overlooked any in his top 100. A great way to celebrate the rich (but often hidden) diversity of search on the Internet today.

So, don’t just sit there, rev up your mouse and VOTE!

As promised, here is BLOGZ, THE blog dedicated to BAAGZ, Exalead’s latest web service.

You can find it at http://blog.baagz.com or via the “Links” in the right menu.

You’ll find there all the news about BAAGZ (new features and events, etc.).

Don’t miss out! Go to BLOGZ:)

At Exalead, we do… or at least we try.

Enjoy !

The Exalead Team wishes you a good year

The Scottish Government selected exalead one:search to open up online access to 25 years worth of official documents on its portal, www.scotland.gov.uk. Exalead was selected not just for its scalability and data-format versatility, but also for the very practical search assistance it provides to site visitors. The Scottish Government has also replaced their legacy enterprise search system that was running on their internal content with Exalead.

Managing an annual budget of more than £30 billion in 2007-2008, the Scottish Government is responsible for most of the issues of day-to-day concern to the people of Scotland, including health, education, justice, rural affairs, and transport. To aid the public in accessing information pivotal to these day-to-day concerns, the Government needed a search tool that was as pragmatic as its mission.

Exalead’s patented search navigation technology fulfills this need, helping users get beyond what they type in the search box to helping them find what they are truly looking for. It does this by guiding visitors through the search process, enabling them to refine their searches according to pre-defined metadata like site section (About, Topics, News, Publications, Consultations), or using automatically-extracted information like document type, creation date, subject matter, document category, related terms, and more. For, as the Scottish saying goes, “The tree doesn’t always fall at the first stroke.”

Phil Bradley, librarian’s librarian and noted search engine blogger, has published “10 Reasons Why Librarians Should Use Exalead.”

“It’s a search engine for people who like to use 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 Wednesday’.”

Thank you, Phil, for the kind words about Exalead, and for furthering the web community’s knowledge about search engine technologies and alternative search engines.

Interested in improving the visibility of your site on our engine? Hopefully this series of posts will help.

First up: answers to the two most frequently posed webmaster questions:

1) Why doesn’t my site appear (or why does it only partially appear) when I do a site search (i.e., typing “site: mysitename.com” in the search box)?

All or part of your site may be inaccessible to our robots. Try the following to improve your performance:

• Make sure that all pages are accessible by at least one static link.
• Place links to your most important content on every page of your site.
• Keeping in mind that certain dynamic pages can’t be accessed by our robots, move content as needed to static (or simply more accessible) pages (see “The Road to Better Site Indexing – Introduction and Episode 1”)
• Be sure the robots.txt file in your root directory is not blocking access to our crawler (use our robot checker form to test accessibility).
• Create a site map (see “The Road to Better Site Indexing: Episode 3, Sitemaps”) and submit it on our site.

2) Why doesn’t my site appear for a given keyword?

• First, check to see that the keyword is in our index for your site. Enter the keyword in the search field, along with “site:mysitename.com” to limit the search for that keyword to just your site (replacing “mysitename.com” with your domain name, of course). If it is not indexed, follow the steps for question 1 above.
• Refine the keywords in your site so they are as specific as possible. It could be the keyword you are checking is too general, and sites that larger, more relevant and/or more popular are ranking ahead of your site for that keyword.
• Verify that the content of your site corresponds well to the keyword. It’s not enough for a keyword to simply appear, it must be integrally related to the rest of the site content.

You’ll find further info on keyword relevancy in Search Engine Optimization (SEO): More Old-School Than You Think.”

And be careful out there! Stick to keeping your content fresh and relevant for your target audience. Reverting to tricks like hidden text, duplicate content, spam link exchanges or other such tactics to improve your ranking could get you banned from our index (for more info, see “The Road to Better Site Indexing – Episode 2”).

You’ll also find general webmaster tips in our site’s help pages.