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.

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!

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.

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.

Join us Thursday, February 28, 2007, 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern Time for the KMWorld Webinar: “Leveraging the Power of Unified Information Access for Effective Knowledge Management” (aka, “Shortcut to a Five-Star Knowledge Base: Lessons from The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)”).

Exalead co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, Director of Knowledge Solutions for The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), will discuss ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. Also on the agenda, hot trends in information access, including the growth of hybrid vertical search applications in business.

Register now for this FREE webinar:
http://www.kmworld.com/webinars/register.aspx?eventid=279&src=kmb

Exalead participated in Search Engine Strategies January 15 and 16 at the Grand Hôtel Intercontinental in Paris.

The program included presentations by the leading search providers in the French marketplace, plus an educational session designed to give practical answers to day-to-day questions about search engine marketing.

Jean Marc Lazard, who heads up strategic projects at Exalead, took the podium to present Exalead and raise awareness of the diversity and versatility of search on the web today.

Here is a PDF of his presentation, “Exalead: For all the ways you use the web”

Enjoy!

Exalead at Search Engine Strategies, Paris 2008

From the 5th to the 8th of November, Berlin receives the Web 2.0 Expo.

This conference aims at building a broader European Web 2.0 community and will tackle Web 2.0 fundamental issues -design, marketing, user experiments…Famous entrepreneurs such as Tariq Krim -Netvibes- or Michael Arrington -TechCrunch- will play a part to this event sharing their knowledge.

BAAGZ, which gets to the heart of Web 2.0 issues, participates to the event.

Exalead will also be part of the Gartner Symposium ITexp in Cannes, from November the 4th to the 8th.

The FOWA Expo 2007 (Future of Web Applications) is currently taking place in London, UK. This tradeshow regroups web companies from all around the world such as Yahoo, Facebook, Flickr… Giving a good preview of what the Internet is going to bring in the next few months.

Exalead exhibits at FOWA to present BAAGZ.