Cool new search engine

by on October 21, 2005

Wow, check out this search engine: Exalead. Gary Price sent that one over to me. It’s not perfect, but the UI shows that a lot more can be done than the big three have done with search.

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.

  • I blocked the Exalead spider from my site over a year ago, since it was not respecting my robots.txt. Now that I have seen this, I might give Exalead another chance...
  • It's awsome!

    See what a difference a little UI design can make? This isn't even revolutionary - half of the decisions they made were no-brainers, but it feels so much better than a single list. Suddenly meaningful information "appears" to be within your grasp, which is generally not the case with MSN, Yahoo or Google.

    The search page is still pretty static, however. I'd start thinking of ways to the user move that data around, organize it, and even take it off the page and onto the desktop.

    Search-based metadata containers...
  • Ahmad J Nicholas
    something seems to be a problem your links do not show on start.com for some reason. you should use it sometime help them get their act together
  • Stefan Constantinescu
    Wow Scoble thanks for this new search engine, I love the speed and variety of ways I can tweak my search results to different file types immediatly.

    This makes previewseek look like garbadge.
  • Some results contain very old data... I noticed a thumbnail for one of my sites that had to be 3+ years old.
  • Farooq
    oooo...Robert you see...quite a few of things I talked about in my email have been implemented albeit in a slightly different way (UI)...I guess a website preview thing will become quite standard pretty soon...

    though I'm still betting on the MSN Search guys to implement smth with a faster response time...

    I was thinking of making a desktop program using the MSN Search API for web searches...hmmm u know what...somehow thick client still seems very very relevant...

    good stuff...
  • ElCapitanAmerica
    This thing "jitters" (page sometimes resizes up and down in a loop) in my Firefox version and it has no scrollbars for the results!
  • ElCapitanAmerica
    The results for HDTV are not great, the google results at least give you links that tell you what HDTV means.

    For the thumbnail previews, you can already do this with google and firefox with this extension;

    http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview/
  • Robert, I believe your original comment was that current search tools didn't make it easy to find the manufacturers. Exalead provides some neat new stuff, but I still don't see the manufacturers.
  • Give a try to their desktop search engine it's a really good soft(http://corporate.exalead.com/enterprise/l=en?p=produits_exalead-desktop_index)
    Here is the post I wrote about it (in french): http://www.outilsfroids.net/news/1010.shtml
  • Good heads-up. I had been using Clusty (clusty.com) in conjunction with the big 3 but this definitely moves Y! and Clusty down the list.
    Thanks.
  • Vivisimo is another useful search engine. It queries a number of search engines .. then using clustering algo, it groups the results under different heads. Check out http://www.vivisimo.com
  • I'm not sure its very good for local searches. I still find google that best at that.
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