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

Enjoy !

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.

To thank our sales team and ace engineers for their stellar performance in 2007, Exalead decided to send the crew to Marrakesh for some well-deserved R&R.

On the agenda: camel rides, go-carts, archery…and tech seminars! Because the quest for better search never ends…

Did you know enterprise search is fast becoming the de facto way to access corporate information, just as web search engines have become the gateways to information on the Internet? We invite both enterprise search neophytes and pros to visit our corporate blog, which covers:

• New enterprise search products
• New enterprise clients
• Technology innovations
• Events and press releases
• Industry observations and news

And of course, don’t forget, we welcome your comments and questions on that blog as well as on this one!

The European Commission has approved funding for QUAERO, an advanced research and development program concerned with the automatic processing of digital multimedia content. The program involves a consortium of 23 partners (including Exalead) and is headed by the Thomson group. Read the press release on Europa, the portal site of the European Union.

On February 28, Exalead, in partnership with KMWorld and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), hosted a webinar in which Exalead’s co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, ARF’s Director of Knowledge Solutions, discussed ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. They also discussed hot trends in information access, including the growing use of hybrid vertical search applications by businesses. If you missed the discussion, you can access it now on KMWorld’s webinar archive.

Exalead is participating in the 14^th annual Documation expo, March 12 and 13 at CNIT Paris, La Défense. This year’s theme: “Bringing content management and document management together.” You’ll find the Exalead team at stand D12.

Get a free visitor’s pass with the code EXA.

Learn more about Documation 2008.

As part of his series “Search Wizards Speak,” search guru Stephen Arnold recently interviewed Exalead founder François Bourdoncle. Though the series focuses mainly on enterprise search technologies, you’ll find much of interest with regard to Bourdoncle’s Alta Vista roots and the company’s guiding “search by serendipity” philosophy, as well as its dedication to unified search across all platforms (desktop, enterprise, mobile, Web…).

Read the interview.