On Search Engine Land, Greg Sterling explains, “In principle, this is comparable to enhanced directory assistance/mobile voice search services being offered in the US by Tellme, 1-800-YellowPages, Jingle Networks and Google (Goog411) but it’s a much broader service.”

Coincidentally, GOOG-411 is getting a share of the spotlight following Click-to-Call’s death.  And Exalead is involved in Quaero, a would-be Google-killer.  Small world, huh?  (Quaero is also associated with Theseus, which has been in the news lately, but this connection is a little more tenuous.)

In any case, “Users in France pay for 118 128 . . . like traditional directory assistance in the US,” according to Sterling.  “By contrast, the services above (Tellme, et al) are all ad-supported – or will be.  In addition to mobile voice search, 118 128 also offers a companion, Internet local search and shopping site.”

On the ExaBlog, there are promises of faster and more accurate search, which should benefit users of 118 218.  And this development should grant Exalead, which is based in France, an even stronger foothold in that country.

Bourdoncle also has thoughts about the Google, Yahoo MSN Sitemaps collaboration: “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it is not nice and closed”. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

I guess this guy’s trying hard to stand out by being critical when what he should be focusing on is what, if any, positive advantages new search technologies will bring consumers.

Comments

Bookmark WebProNews:

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

For instance, I did a search for HDTV. Now look along the left side. You get related terms, related categories, can view Web sites by location, and get a good look at document types being served up. Neat icons of each result, too.

>>> Exalead

Reader Comments…

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Initially, one billion Web pages are being made available on its Website.

Exalead’s vision is that the way people are accessing the Web, especially through easy-to-use search engines, is going to define how business users access their information tomorrow. By leveraging the user-centric features and unmatched scalability of its enterprise software, Exalead is now able to offer Internet users the same power and ease of use that its business customers have enjoyed for years. Entering the consumer market allows Exalead to fill-in the next step of its roadmap.

With this new service, Exalead is now entering the elite club of international Web search engines. This service is intended to be a demonstrator for its innovative technology and to confirm its ambitions to be the number one information access leader, be it for the Internet, e-mails, intranets, corporations or personal computers.

Today, by making more pages, documents and information searchable for more languages and countries, Exalead has opened to an international audience a new window to the world.

A Whole New Search Experience

Designed to make life for Internet users easier, this new search service features a totally new and richer experience for information access, for speed, interactive navigation and ease of use.

“As we believe that a simple list of search results is woefully inadequate to search through billions of Web pages, we have decided to deploy on the Web the navigation system that has made us popular in the past four years with corporations and the general public alike. Now we have made navigation even more powerful by providing geographic navigation and document type selection,” announced Francois Bourdoncle, CEO of Exalead.

In addition to deploying its unique navigation system on the Web, Exalead is introducing many innovative features to help Internet users when they need it the most, and in ways they want to be helped:

– Spelling suggestions, approximate and phonetic searches, automatic word stemming, etc.

– Visually-enhanced search results with thumbnails and “safe page preview.”

– Ability to sort search results by relevance, source, or even by date.

– Guides to help you quickly refine your search based on keywords, categories, language, document format, and even by country.

– Bookmarks to save the pages you find interesting as you navigate through the search results.

– A smart translation system, developed in collaboration with Systran.

– Breakthrough real-time Web indexing technology.

– Discover more innovative features on www.exalead.com.

Innovative Features

The following is a sample of Exalead features that simplifies search for all Internet users.

Thumbnails: As a picture is worth more than words, each search result has a thumbnail to give a visual preview of the page. Non-Web pages such as PDF or Microsoft Word(R) documents are represented by an icon for quick identification. This feature makes search pleasant to use and is available for every page contained in Exalead’s index — a world’s first. It makes it much easier to recognize a logo or a site you have already visited, to distinguish between a personal site and a corporate site, or to avoid spam sites.

Preview: By clicking on a search result, Exalead quickly shows a preview without formatting in the bottom half of the screen. Search terms are highlighted and a fast-forward button allows you to see the next search term in a click. This preview protects public users and companies from viruses by not opening the original document (Webpage, PDF, Word, etc.), so no fear of viruses — think of it as risk-free surfing! Keyboard shortcuts make the interface even faster to use.

Bookmarks: The “Add a bookmark” function is in the preview window. If Internet users find a page interesting, it allows them to store the page’s address in their browser’s favorites list. They no longer have to open many windows to avoid losing what they have found — Exalead bookmarks what users find important so they can come back to it later.

Exploring a Site: Does it bother you that most search engines show many results from the same site, when the site is of no interest? Exalead’s innovation is to show only the most relevant page from every site (or a sub site of very large sites).

If the site contains many relevant documents, the icon for the site is a clickable folder, which opens up to allow you explore the site. Very practical in use, this two-step method provides the best of both worlds.

Real-Time: The freshness of search results is as important as their relevance. Exalead has real-time indexation technology (even for billions of pages), allowing it to remain synchronized with the Web to ensure the freshest results possible at all times. Of course there is always a delay between the creation of a new document and its arrival on the search engine, but this delay is now the strict minimum.

Sort by Date: Exalead allows for the first time ever the sorting of documents by date. Combined with the real-time indexation, this method makes real-time information monitoring much more efficient.

Natural Language: Totally multilingual, Exalead has linguistic tools to help everyone search with greater ease. For example, the search engine automatically searches on word roots (‘race horse’ can find documents with the words ‘race horses’). The search engine recognizes compound words, to better refine the search, and it offers to automatically translate documents that are not in your language.

Finally, Exalead makes spelling suggestions for misspelled words, and in difficult cases, it makes phonetic searches or even searches that are tolerant of spelling mistakes!

A New Way to Explore the Web

Traditional search engines are good for finding information you already know about, but on the other hand, they are very poor for exploring information. Exalead shows not only the search results, but also a table of contents on the left side. This provides a quick overview of all the documents in the search results (and not just the first ones shown). It allows users to refine their search on a navigation axis.

These axes consist of:

– The relevant directory entries from the human built Open Directory.

– The Website’s geographic location.

– The document’s format (Webpage, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

– And a set of related terms that represent various themes identified by the search engine while computing the search results.

Using sophisticated real-time statistical linguistic technologies, Exalead is actually able to automatically extract even the rarest themes from search results to provide an exhaustive and powerful navigational aid.

By clicking on one or more of these navigation axes, the user is able to “surf the Web” without ever leaving the search engine!

Advanced Features

The Exalead search engine features many advanced operators typically found on high-end professional systems only. Exalead enterprise products like Exalead Corporate or Exalead Mail feature even more advanced features.

Word Stemming: Exalead not only allows word prefix searches, but also powerful regular expression searches, including word patterns with wildcards. This exclusive technology is a must for crossword puzzle lovers!

Boolean Operators: Exalead features full-blown Boolean operators that power users need to better formulate their searches. Contrary to most other search engines, these operators can be combined at will. The NEAR operator can be used to perform proximity searches, and the OPT operator can be used to rank documents without filtering out documents in which they do not appear.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.