Exalead has launched its new interface that has been in beta and preview mode for the past month or so. They also report indexing over 8 billion pages (they had initially stated they would meet that goal in the summer, so they are not too far behind schedule).
Exalead Review has been updated.
What’s new?
- Nicer, cleaner results display
- Refine suggestions now on the right
- Thumbnail screen shots now on the left
- Web 2.0 look and feel
- Text ads from Yahoo!
- Refine results first present a few options. Click on "More choices" at the
bottom for complete list. Note that unlike any of the other major search
engines, with the full "More choices" Exalead gives percentage breakdowns
of the locations, file types, and languages of the results set. This can be
useful for getting a sense of Web coverage of certain topics by region,
language, and file type. - More languages than any other search engine. Now up to 54 with many
Indian and Asian language limits not available from other major search engines
Which advanced features are still available? See my
updated review for the current feature set.
- Almost all of the old ones:
- Truncation
- Proximity
- New prefixes offer quick access to some (soundslike: spellslike: for
example). See
field section of my review for details.
What’s gone?
- Only thing that I’ve noticed are the date sorting options
Gary had a nice overview yesterday and notes that no help files are available at this point. Hopefully, that will be rectified soon.
UPDATE 10/11: Gwen points out that the date sorting is still available with the sort:new command. (sort:old works as well.) Also, the site: field search is behaving strangely. It works for me for top level domains like .com and .edu, but it does not work for some country top level domains, like .ca, as Gwen notes. I get results from site:com and site:usask.ca and site:fr and even site:strange, but site:ca does not. Meanwhile, country:ca works but brings up sites geotargeted as being from Canada without the .ca top level domain. I also found some simple documentation. I hope they fix the site: operator soon.
And one other significant point from Gwen is that clicking on the “Preview” is bringing up a cached copy of the page. Note that it includes the date crawled in the upper left under the Exalead logo with the preface of “Copy of . . . .” Nicely done!