These days, web search is dominated by giants, and it’s rare to see the emergence of a new potentially world-class search engine. Meet Exalead, a powerful search tool with features not offered by the major search engines.
Exalead is a fairly new search engine from France, introduced in October 2004 and still officially in beta. Having passed the one-billion page mark in 2005, it’s still 1/8th the size of Google or Yahoo, but what’s a few billion pages among friends? Actually, after a certain point, size really doesn’t matter. The key factors in evaluating a search engine should include timeliness, ability to handle ambiguity, and plenty of power search tools. Exalead does a great job, at least on two of these three criteria.