How to get the most out of Exalead (beat Google?) - Phil Bradley
Update's internet guru Phil Bradley has added a new section to his regular Update column 'Internet Q&A' where he dissects a new - lesser-known than Google - search engine every month.
The first search engine he examines is Exalead.
Here's this section from Phil's column. You can read the full column by logging in to Update's digital edition.
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This month I’m starting a new feature called ‘SearchLight’ in which I shine a light on different search engines which you may or may not have heard of. It’s all too easy to simply go straight to Google to answer queries and, while Google is extraordinarily useful, it’s perhaps not always the best place to go. I’ll take one engine per month and point out interesting and useful functionality that you can try which offers something that perhaps other engines can’t.
This month I’m going to look at Exalead, which was founded in 2000. The first thing to notice when you visit the search engine is that you can add in some shortcuts in the first place, allowing you to personalise it. It’s a nice touch and if this was a computer home page it would be a good way of alerting staff or users to other sites or search engines without any fuss or hard work.
Search functionality is excellent and it has all the syntax that you would expect. What are particularly noteworthy, however, are the advanced search functions. You can use word stemming such as ‘librar*’, phonetic spelling, approximate spelling, proximity searching, nested logic, regular expressions, searching for pages modified before or after a particular date, country/language searching, filetype searching and more.
Display of results is good, with three options: text only; text with thumbnails; text with thumbnails and extra data. A particularly useful function is the ability to narrow searches. If you’re working with people who don’t have particularly strong search skills it might be worth using Exalead with them, since you can narrow results in a variety of ways – related terms, site types (blogs, forums and non/commercial sites), multimedia, geographic location (not only by country but also by region such as Africa or Europe). Finally there’s a directory option as well.
Exalead has other tabbed search options, and you can also use it to search images. The advanced search options here are also impressive, since you can limit a search by image size, facial content, orientation, filetype, colour/b&w/greyscale. Users can jump to the hosting site, save images to their computers or to their personalised Exalead account. Another tab allows users to search Wikipedia, while another allows video search across a number of different video sites such as YouTube, LiveVideo and Daily Motion.
I hope this quick overview will tempt you to try out Exalead if you haven’t already done so; for my money this should certainly be included in the ‘top four’ on functionality alone.
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Do keep e-mailing philb@philb.com with your questions for him to answer in his monthly column (mark your e-mail 'Update Query').
And all you Phil Bradley fans will want to know – if you don't already – that he's recently updated his I want to: Web 2.0 applications, utilities and resources to cover over 1,000 Web 2.0 resources - in 21 categories. Everything from collaboration tools and discovery resources to start pages, wikis and training/teaching applications.
He blogs about this updated resource here: Over 1,000 Web 2.0 applications.
Enjoy!
Matthew Mezey
(News Editor, Library and Information Update magazine)
