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:)