The start of the new academic year is often time for renewal: new haircut, new wardrobe, new books…In keeping with tradition, Exalead introduces you to the new and improved version of its blog.

Graphically speaking, our Artistic Director (whose creativity is unstoppable) has had no boundaries. And the results speak for itself - a more polished design, modern style graphics, nice colours…It is a sight for sore eyes!

But I’m sure you would agree, that graphics aren’t everything (what really matters is inside, isn’t it?), that’s why a search bar has been added. You can now search in the blog’s contents or the web directly. And to make it even easier for you, you can directly access the most recent posts or search for articles by author.

As you can see, the new blog has it all!! Exalead felt that they owed you this much. Especially those of you who keep this blog alive!

We hope you like this new version and we are anxiously waiting for your feedback!

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

Exalead is now available in Netvibes’ standard search engine list.
To add Exalead to your Netvibes “Web Search” widget, choose “Manage Search
Engines…” from the pull down menu of the active search engine, then click on
Exalead.

Now the whole Netvibes community will have a chance to discover
The Other Search Engine. Welcome Netvibers, and Happy Searching!

Search engines are evolving very rapidly these days, and Google is certainly leading the race. But look closely at what Google has recently announced. The recent “Universal Search” initiative is very interesting in what it tells us about what Google is having a hard time doing, namely, having users take advantage of the many specialty search engines and services that they have to offer (image search, video search, book search, google scholar, etc.).

In more ways than one, what Google is trying to do is to introduce some form of serendipity between their specialty searches, so that people looking for something on the Web discover, for instance, that there are videos or books about that topic. This is the clearest indication that the very “linear” user experience that Google has imposed as a de-facto standard for search is about to reach a hard limit.

But as Exalead users know, Search By Serendipity (R) has been at the very heart of Exalead’s technology since day one : between different vertical search engines through the little “Exa mascott” that suggests audio or video results in the Web search, and in the more unique way within each vertical Exalead search application using a tag cloud of concepts to navigate in the search results (of our Wikipedia search for instance). It’s a better way to search that Exalead has developed and invested significant resources in to evolve.

We certainly find this process of searching by serendipity the most natural user experience for search, and we are very flattered to see the market leader validate that vision.

On a similar track, we are very pleased to see that Exalead’s latest innovations (image search with face recognition) has also been introduced (although still in a hidden form) a few days ago by Google. Maybe they had to release this ahead of schedule? Who knows…

We’re happy to announce that you can now use Exalead to easily and quickly search
all your favorite videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Kewego
and IFILM web sites.

To date we’ve indexed over 4 million videos using classification information
including author, title, date, description, duration, tags and categories,
and we’re adding new titles to our index each second!

In spite of the huge number of videos indexed, navigating the search results
is a snap with easy sort and filter options.

Use the pull-down box at the top right of your search results
() to sort the results by:

· Relevance,
· Most recent,
· Most rated,
· Most viewed, or
· Length.

You can also use the “Narrow your search” panel to refine your search by
source (website) or video length:

And just below the “Narrow your search” panel is a ‘cloud’ of keywords that
synthesizes the tags and categories of the videos appearing in your search
results, allowing you to refine your search across all video sites with a
single click.

Each search result listing includes a thumbnail image of the video, a title,
a summary description, and details such as author, duration, upload date,
and a viewer score represented by stars. Place your cursor over the stars
for more details about the score.

Selecting the detailed view gives you instant access to related videos by
associated tags and categories:

You can also click on an author’s name to discover other videos by that
author.

So no more hopping from site to site to find what you seek: simply go to
Exalead and let the cameras roll!

The Exalead Web Team

A new version of Exalead’s image search engine went online April 19th. This new version with one billion images indexed (which carried the more information out of two billion images initially indexed) and new functionalities, including some proposed by the Exalead feedbackers.

Our teams had the pleasure of collaborating with LTU Technologies, a company specializing in image recognition and searching, on one of the most exciting new features, search refinement by content type, commencing with a filter for faces.

This new « Face » filter enables you to narrow your search results to images containing faces (permitting you to more easily find close ups of your favorite stars like Brad Pitt or Monica Bellucci).

The “Content > Face” filter joins the other handy filters on the unique “Narrow Your Search” panel:

• Size: Find the right size image for your presentation.
• Wallpapers: Discover background images just right for your monitor’s resolution.
• Image Color, Layout, File Type: Filter the results of your search by useful criteria such as black & white vs. color, landscape or portrait layout, or file types like JPEG, GIF or PNG.
• Related Terms, Search within Results: Refocus your search using an automatically generated list of related keywords (“Related Terms”) or narrow your results by adding additional keywords of your own choosing (“Search within Results”).

All these options make it easier than ever to find the precise images you are seeking, whether they be stills from the first King Kong film or specific canvases from Van Gogh’s self-portraits.

All you have to do now is go forth and experiment with all the advanced image search functions, and enjoy the results. And don’t forget to try out a different background color for the viewing the images!

We hope you’ll be thoroughly pleased with this latest version of our image search, and we look forward to sharing new product enhancements with you again soon!

The Wikipedia search option, our latest feature (with plenty more to come!), has been released in a beta version in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.

With a new presentation of the search results and a completely new “Narrow your search” panel, this research module offers an intriguing new access to the famous online encyclopedia. Not only can you easily find the Wikipedia article you’re seeking, you
can also refine your search by tapping into the rich cascade of ‘tags’
in the “Narrow your search” panel, choosing among language, geography,
famous people, names of organizations, related keywords or Wikipedia
categories to refine your search.

In addition to the “Narrow your search” tags, each search result listing
offers instant access to:

• The Wikipedia categories associated with the article,
• Famous people mentioned in the article,
• The organizations and geographical locations associated with the article (available by clicking on the “Show images, text and extra info” icon at the top right-hand side of the results).

Follow your curiosity from one click to another as you explore the riches of the Wikipedia encyclopedia with an ease, simplicity and efficiency never before possible.

We send out our special thanks to our feedbackers who helped make this new feature a reality, and who keep us working night and day . Don’t hesitate to join us at http://feedback.exalead.com.

Happy Searching!

The Web Team

Exalead has added a new function to your search refinement toolkit: the ability to narrow your results to just blogs or forums.

This new functionality will help you to:

• Obtain the very latest information,
• Find pertinent product information without getting lost in a sea of advertising and price comparison sites,
• Easily access the opinions of other consumers: What is the best digital camera on the market? Where is a good bargain hotel in London? What should you expect when you’re expecting twins??
• Discover new forums and blogs you may otherwise never have found, and much more.

Alternatively, you may choose to exclude blogs and forums from your search if these sites do not carry the type of information for which you are looking.

Bravo to our feedbackers for suggesting this feature, and to our Exalead engineers for developing the advanced classification algorithms capable of determining if a site is a blog or forum, of automatically refreshing blog and forum indexes, and of optimising the classification system to more
efficiently manage this new process.

A new battalion of servers arrives on the scene….

With the launch of the German and Spanish sites, it was time to beef up our server network. The new machines arrived a week ago. These reinforcements will enable maximum responsiveness for our search engine, while allowing us to add some fancy new features we may not have been able to add before. So engineers, time to let loose your creativity!

The Web Team

After having consumed countless liters of coffee, our web team is a little red-eyed but very excited to announce the official launch of the German and Spanish language versions of the Exalead search engine. The sites were launched at the beginning of this year, and Exalead President François Bourdoncle celebrated by participating in a conference organized in Spain by OJOBuscador.

As with the French site, each local version of Exalead features a Feedback Site where users can share the ideas regarding their Exalead search engine.

We’re already warming up our coffee pots for the next round of new language versions, with Italian next on the list (not officially launched, but already accessible ).

The Marketing Team