Have you heard of Exalead? While it is not a new (except to me) search engine that takes a very interesting approach to search. It looks terribly sexy for a search engine. As for the company itself, here is what they have to say for themselves:
Bred from the prestigious Ecole des Mines in Paris, the founding members of Exalead cut their teeth on the first generation of Web search engines. Since the creation of Exalead in 2000, they have concentrated their efforts on facilitating access to their client’s information bases for all users: Employees, customers, suppliers, and the general public.
Exalead has a very strong R&D team to help maintain our technological advantage. The managers at Exalead are still strongly attached to their research background, and today they are guest lecturers at some of France’s most prestigious engineering universities.
Three-quarters of Exalead’s employees are computer engineering graduates from some of the largest French engineering universities: Polytechnique, Ecoles des Mines de Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, etc.
Exalead’s head office is located in Paris, France. In January 2003, the Southern Europe Office opened in Italy.
Of course any search engine is only as good as its results and while I haven’t conducted an empirical analysis of Exalead’s performance compared to, say, Google and Yahoo!, I do like the way search results are presented. If you look carefully and this screenshot, you’ll see that not only can you change the way the search results are displayed on the page (text list, thumbnails of pages or a combination of both) but you are also given a list of relevant and alternative search results and even geographical sortings of search results. As with Google and Yahoo!, you can also display audio and video search results based on your search criteria. In all, quite a nifty search engine and it doesn’t look exactly like Google either (just for you Mladen ;-)).
(via Seth’s Blog, Social Patterns and SEOBook)
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What do you think?