Phil Bradley, who writes one of the best blogs on search engines, posted an article about Exalead’s logo for Halloween.

Congratulations to our (new) graphic designer.

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.

Determined to protect the mobility of Exaleaders everywhere, our ace engineers have developed a new interface optimised for display on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. The new interface is light and sleek but still offers all the core features Exalead searchers have come to rely on: a choice of Web, Image, Wikipedia or Video search, and a host of options for refining search results.

If you’re a lucky owner of one of these two sweet new devices, discover your favorite search engine anew at http://i.exalead.com.

A big “Thank You!” to Exaleader Benoît Guyon for having proposed the idea for the new interface on our feedback site. Have a suggestion of your own? Be heard at http://feedback.exalead.com/.

Every month the excellent blog AltSearchEngines updates its list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines (ASE), selecting one as its Search Engine of the Month (SEM). For the month of October, the honors go to Exalead!

Notes the AltSearchEngines editor:  “Exalead offers new tools that allow you to find the information you seek on the Web quicker and better, with many helpful options.…For excellence in Search, constant improvement and innovation, we feel that Exalead has demonstrated why it belongs in the SEM club on ASE!”

The post highlights some of the different types of search Exalead offers (Web, Image, Advanced Search,…), accompanying search tools (Exalead Toolbar, Desktop, …) and the new BAAGZ social search service (see our September 26th post  and the Baagz presentation video).

AltSearchEngine previously named Exalead to its Top 10 Alternative Video Search Engines. View the current Search Engine of the Month post.

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.

Here’s a video of Exalead CEO François Bourdoncle presenting Baagz at DEMOfall 2007.

Exalead is proud to present the first semantic search service that lets people find, organize, share and enhance content online. Along with the introduction of the new BAAGZ search service, Exalead launches a special by-invitation-only beta session.

With BAAGZ, Exalead has been selected along with 70 other companies to take part in the prestigious DEMOFall in San Diego that is taking place right now.

WHAT IS BAAGZ?
BAAGZ is a new form of social network that can be described as a live network of shared interests. It allows users (we like to call them “baagerz”) to easily organize their favorite things and topics online into individual “baagz.” While BAAGZ offers a simple way for users to organize their favorite online content, it also helps to educate BAAGZ about what is of interest to its users, or baagerz, and connect them with related content or other baagerz who are experts on a given topic.

HOW DOES BAAGZ WORK?
Shared interests are characterized by the public content contained within individual folders, called baagz, that act as shortcuts to your favorite Web sites, articles, pictures, videos, RSS feeds and notes.

Exalead’s expertise in indexing the Semantic Web (www.exalead.com) is at the core of BAAGZ. BAAGZ uses its semantic description of every Web site stored in a baag to determine what a given baag is about – whether or not a given Web site is specifically tagged by baagerz.

Our development team has been hard at work on BAAGZ for over a year and represents more than a decade of R&D. BAAGZ combines the best of search technology and aims to capture the very essence of what is referred to as Web 2.0.

For the moment, BAAGZ is available in beta version (Firefox2+) and by invitation only. For more information or to request your invitation to the BAAGZ private beta, please visit www.baagz.com.

Many websites are already talking about BAAGZ, including Mashable, Paul Gillin’s blog and Econtentmag.

You can also read the entire Press Release.

Officially launched earlier this month at GITEX (Gulf Information Technology Exhibition) in Dubai, the TAYAIT.com engine aims to become the search engine of choice in the Arabic-speaking world.

To help TAYAIT achieve its goal, the Exalead-powered platform offers access to 50 million Arabic web pages (soon to be 100 million), and the site incorporates Exalead’s acclaimed Wikipedia and image search tools. In addition, TAYAIT takes advantage of Exalead’s flexible API infrastructure in integrating Encyclopedia Britannica’s® market leading plug-in for Arabic language text analysis.

A veritable tour de force realized in record time—less than three months…Together with the Dutch search engine www.ilse.nl, TAYAIT aptly demonstrates the capability of Exalead’s technology to respond to the most complex Internet search challenges, in any language.

Well known to computer programmers, regular expressions (“regex” or “regexp” to insiders) are also a secret search weapon of librarians around the globe. A regular expression is simply a text pattern that can be used to find matching text strings. Regular expressions use wildcards and special shorthand notations to describe these patterns. Regular expressions are not available in most search engines, but they are part of Exalead’s Advanced Search options (which is one reason hard-core info-geeks are so fond of Exalead!).

What does a regular expression look like? Let’s look at an example using a period (“.”), the regular expression wildcard representing all letters of the alphabet. If you wanted to use this wildcard within a regular expression in the Exalead engine, you would first frame your query with forward-slash marks “/” to indicate it’s a regular expression, then place the period wherever you wanted variations of a single letter to appear. Thus, the regular expression “/c.p/” would return matches where the “.” is replaced by any single letter, as in “cop,” “cup” and “cap”.

Now one would be hard pressed to imagine a practical reason for running a search that would return both “cop” and “cup,” but using regular expressions to search for potentially misspelled proper names, product codes or technical terms can be very handy.

Imagine for instance you’re doing some research on Exalead. To make sure you haven’t missed an important document in which Exalead has been misspelled, you might try something like “/ex.lead/” to catch variants such as “exelead” or “exilead”.

You could also try “/exa*lead/”, with the asterisk (“*”) being a regex wildcard that indicates the preceding letter can be repeated 0 or more times. A search on “/exa*lead/” would therefore return variants like “exalead”, “exaalead” and “exaaalead”.

If you wanted to exclude documents in which Exalead was correctly spelled, you could simply add “-exalead” to your query, i.e. “/exa*lead/ -exalead”, returning only matches like “exaalead” and “exaaalead”. (The minus sign is an Exalead Advanced Search option that lets you exclude words from the results for any query. Looking for company names containing “Einstein” but no time to wade through a zillion articles on Albert Einstein? Try “einstein -albert“!).

Sometimes, you may not be using regular expressions to hunt for misspellings but rather to include legitimate spelling variations, like “color” (American English) and “colour” (British English). Here, you could use a vertical bar (“|”) between alternative characters or words, which is regex ‘shorthand’ for “or”. For example, entering “/gr(a|e)y/ whale” would tell ExaBot to find all matches for either “gray whale” or “grey whale.”

To learn more about regular expressions, take a look at the regex Wikipedia article. Be sure to also look over all of Exalead’s Advanced Search options. Used alone or in combination (as with the “/exa*lead/ -exalead” example), they offer an easy way to inject some high-octane fuel into your next query.

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!