Are We Seeing the Beginning of a Comeback for Exalead in the General Web Search Space?, Resource Shelf (May 28)
ResourceShelf has noticed some improvements in Exalead. This is a search technology company based in France. It made quite a splash 5 years ago or so with the public search service, which information professionals (including myself) extolled because of its strong syntax. Exalead even redid the interface a couple of times. But the database became very stale and has been for at least the past year, and it was clear longer that Exalead was not as good as others in blocking spam.
Is it worth our attention now? ResourceShelf has found freshness to be better and identifies some good features.
I have always liked the choices in the right rail to help searchers refine results, and the advanced search is in easy-to-understand words rather than boxes on a complex form. Exalead has also added "related searches".
On the negative:
+ The thumbnails annoy me - they are too small to help one assess the target site and take up space.
+ There are more ads than there used to be.
+ The database is either still too small or not fresh. On a search on semantic search technologies, a topic that people write about weekly, I would expect something more than a blog entry from Ask.com dated Jan 1, 2009.
On balance - Exalead will have to do much more to get information professionals back.
Posted by Gwen at May 29, 2010 03:08 AM