Exalead's Home Page Gets a New Look

Exalead, the Paris-based general-purpose web engine we’ve blogged about several times during the past year, has redesigned their home page.

Although total database size means little, they have also posted an increase to the size of Exaldead database now passing the two billion page mark according (according to the site). In this case, I’ll say that a growing total illustrates that Exalead continues to expand their offerings and also shows their desire to play in the leagues of some of the larger general-purpose web engines.

Exalead is now using the slogan “One:Web Search” to differentiate this product from the now publicly available: “One: Desktop Search.” That’s right, a new desktop search client. Btw, Exalead is also offering enterprise and workgroup tools using the “Exalead One” name.

The new home page is clean, sparse and easy to use. You’ll find a single search box with direct links to an advanced interface, language and other preferences, and help.

Exalead continues to offer many advanced search options including stemming, phonetic search, proximity search (hooray!), and others — many not available elsewhere.

Directly below the search box, you’ll find four boxes labelled, “add shortcut.” Here’ you can add-in hyperlinked static images of favorite pages. This personalization feature has been available since late December. Update: Fellow blogger and librarian Phil Bradley points out in an email that you can have up to 18 shortcuts on your home page.

At this point, search results pages look much the same as they have in the past. I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll get a makeover soon. Results pages are filled with useful data that can make focusing your results a point and click operation.

The left column consists of:
+ Related Terms
+ Related Categories (I belive Exalead uses the ODP)
+ Web Site Location (Where in the world the page is coming from)
+ Limit by Document Type (Need to see only PDF files, just click)

Along the top of a results page, in a gray box, look for a button labeled “RSS.” If you select it, links to RSS feeds that are available for sites listed in your results become visible.

Also in the gray box are three buttons that allow you to select how the results page is laid out.

Finally, in most cases, the right side of a results page contains static thumbnail images of each result page. Actually, a change in the Exalead’s preference section allows you to determine where you want to see the thumbnails (left or right side of page).

Kudos to Exalead on the home page makeover and we’re looking forward to seeing more changes and enhancements in the future. Hat Tip: G.N.

Postscript: One other cool feature that Exalead offers is very similar to what Clusty and others have provided for a while. When you’re on a web results page, click anywhere on a result snippet. A new window will open at the bottom of the results page with a LIVE version of the page. You can even bookmark it!