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Review of Exalead Search

Last updated Jul. 12, 2023.
by Greg R.

Exalead is a new beta search engine as of October 2004. Hailing from France, it has an interesting and different approach to presenting results. The beta version is available at beta.exalead.com/search/. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.

Databases: Just a database of crawled Web pages, although it also has the ability to bring in directory results from the Open Directory.

Strengths:
  * Truncation, proximity, and other advanced operators
  * Includes thumbnails of pages
  * Provides several narrowing options on left side

Weaknesses:
  * Complex screen layout can cause confusion
  * Smaller database than the major search engines
  * Beta software

Default Operation: Multiple search terms are processed as an AND operation by default. So adding more terms should get fewer results.

Boolean Searching: Exalead appears to support Boolean operators and nested searching with the operators AND, OR, and NOT. Either AND NOT or NOT can be used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. Operators must be in upper case. Exalead can also use - for NOT but only when it is not used along with the Boolean operators. In the Advanced Search, it also has drop-down choices for "containing," "not containing," and "preferably containing." There is also an OPT operator which means that the word following it is an optional word.

Proximity Searching: Phrase searching is available by using "double quotes" around a phrase. It also supports a NEXT operator for ordered proximity of one (in other words, the same thing as a phrase search. So "double quotes"  should get the same results as double NEXT quotes. Exalead also supports the NEAR operator for 16 word proximity

Note: Exalead's Advanced Search also the following choices which can be used for Boolean, proximity, and other types of special searches:

• the words
• any of these words
• the exact phrase
• the words at proximity
• the words starting with
• regular expression.

 Truncation: On a search with two or more words, stemming is automatic. Exalead also supports truncation using an asterisk * symbol. Stemming is also controlled on the preferences page. 

Case Sensitivity: Exalead has no case sensitive searching. Using either lower or upper or mixed case will result in the same hits.

Field Searching: Exalead supports a title search.

Limits: Exalead has limits for language, country, file type, site, and date available on the Advanced Search page. 

The file type limit includes text, PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Rich Text Format, Corel WordPerfect, and Shockwave Macromedia Flash.

The Advanced Search page offers a site/domain limit, which can be used to limit results to those from the specified domain.

The language limit is available on the Advanced Search page and include the following 11 as of March 2005:

• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish

An Adult Content filter tries to exclude adult Web pages and is available on the preferences page.

Stop Words: Some common words such as 'a,' 'the,' and 'in' are ignored, but they can be searched with a + in front. Within a phrase search, all words are searched.

Sorting: Results are sorted by a relevance algorithm. Pages are also clustered by site. Only one page per site will be displayed. Others are available via the yellow folder and domain name. The Advanced Search page includes two date sort options.

Display: Exalead has a packed search results page. The Web results include the page title, a keyword in context extract, the domain name, file size, and a date. Thumbnail screenshots of the page display to the right. The left side of the page includes suggestions for related search terms, directory categories, Web site location limits, and file type limits.

Documentation:
Search Help
Exalead Information