On August 20th, in honor of Read/WriteWeb’s Online Video Week, the blog dedicated to ‘alternative’ search engines, AltSearchEngines, published a list of the “Top 10 Alternative Video Search Engines.”

Exalead is very pleased to have made this list of top “video search engines,” especially since it, along with two others on the list, is not even a specialized video search engine, but rather an engine that searches all the web. But we’re not going to rest on our laurels. We will be rolling out enhancements to our video search engine in the coming weeks, notably in terms of sources and refreshment rates. We’ll keep you posted!

Carole&Co

Formulating predictions, such as the movements of the stock market or the likelihood of a movie’s success, have traditionally been costly, and unevenly successful, endeavors. Prediction research often involves labor-intensive efforts to understand geographically localized social trends and “on-the-ground” conditions. Now, as reported in Knowledge@Wharton , two Wharton professors, Albert Saiz and Uri Simonsohn, have found a cheaper way to deliver some of the same benefits as this type of resource-intensive research: an Internet search.

Using Exalead as their Internet search tool of choice, they chose to study political corruption as a test case. They found that the Internet search results for this topic on Exalead showed a strong correlation to ‘real world’ facts regarding corruption, namely, the frequency and proximity of the word ‘corruption’ alongside various locality names and socioeconomic indicators matched known ‘real-world’ corruption linkages.

This reliable correlation means social scientists are likely to use Internet search statistics as a proxy for measuring local social trends that are otherwise difficult to assess (such as measurements within relatively closed societies), and certainly astute market researchers will be adding Internet search results analysis to their arsenal in determining the best markets for product launches or the best geographical distribution for campaign election funds.

Of course at Exalead, we’re as interested in innovative ways to use Internet search as we are pleased that these two professors assessed all the major search engines over the course of their research, and selected Exalead as the most reliable (giving high marks on reliability to Ask.com as well). The others, Simonsohn stated, either couldn’t support a single automated search or were simply too unreliable, producing radically different results from week to week. You can download the complete paper from the Social Science Research Network site.

Carole&Co

In our prior episodes:
The crawler known as “Bot” travels across the web, moving from page to page and site to site by following links he discovers along the way. But Bot isn’t the type to let himself be led about aimlessly. He tries to imitate his hero Humphrey Bogart, who never shied away from a tangled web yet always managed to stay on the right track.

But being a perfectionist, Bot wasn’t entirely satisfied with his own method. Was he overlooking a significant thread? Leaving an important page unturned? He had a hunch he could do better.

Leaving important content in the dustbin of unindexed pages was just the sort of slip-up that really peeved Bot’s equally perfectionist client Betty, a.k.a. “The Webmaster.” Betty had specifically called on Bot to crawl her entire site, and Bot had missed several pages.

To get their relationship back on the right track, Bot had an idea: he would ask Betty to tell him flat out everything she wanted him to know about her site. And being a guy always in the know, Bot knew just what tool Betty could use to set the record straight: a sitemap.
He proposed; she accepted.

Now Betty can rest easy knowing all the content she wants to share with the world will be indexed. And just what is this handy tool known as a sitemap?
It’s actually not much more than a laundry list of links. Constructing one is a snap. You simply create a text file listing the URLs you want indexed, along with any key facts you want Bot to know (like how often a file is updated), and place it anywhere you’d like, giving Bot the location in your robots.txt file, for example at the root of your web site: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.

Sitemaps can be written in XML (the preferred method), or communicated via syndication feeds or simple text files. A sitemap in XML looks something like this:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa</loc>
</url>
</urlset>

You can visit http://www.sitemaps.org/ for all the details. It’s the official site of the Sitemaps protocol, which was first proposed by Google, then fleshed out through discussions with MSN, Yahoo and Ask. It’s now the standard adopted by Google, Yahoo, Ask, and, as of July 2007, Exalead.
But bad guys consider yourselves forewarned: Bot knows not every webmaster is not as straight up as Betty. He stays a step ahead of all nefarious sitemap tricks, checking out every list of links spun his way and skipping right over bum lists.

Sébastien

Exalead has become a partner in the ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) initiative, a joint project of the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council.

Working with leading publishers, search engines and other technical and commercial partners, APAC’s aim is to develop a global, open and flexible standard for communicating permissions information relating to the access and use of content on the Internet.

As a global provider of search software for business and the Web, Exalead is actively participating in the ACAP pilot project.

“Exalead offers the technical capacity, capability and enthusiasm to ensure the pilot project succeeds and to enable ACAP to demonstrate a fully workable proposal by the final project conference, which is to be held on 29 November in New York,” said Gavin O’Reilly, president of World Association of Newspapers, one of the pilot’s sponsors.

Read the full Press Release

Carole&co

After a number of requests by our users, we’ve decided to offer a lighter version of our homepage; containing simply a search field. You can access this page via the link “Vintage Homepage”.

Exalead will then remember your choice and use this page during future visits. At any time, you can go back to the personalized version and your shortcuts via the link “Personalized Homepage”.

The Vintage Homepage gets its name from its look; a bit old school. It’s kind of a tribute to the era when web pages were much less interactive.

So, this one’s for the nostalgic!

- Damucho, for the webdev team

This little froggy was strolling around Madeleine place Friday afternoon for the filming of a Canadian television program.

After a little searching, we have found our frog at Brocoboutique.

Carole&co