Two Exalead items for you.

1) We’ve been admirers (and users) of what Francois and his team at Exalead have been up to for the past few years. The company has been around for about seven years (with a focus on enterprise search) and in late 2004, they launched a general purpose web engine. For power searchers, Exalead offers a bunch of advanced search syntax including a proximity operator.

Lately, we’ve been noticing that for some (NOT all) pages, the recrawl and refresh rates (how often the crawler returns and how often the database is updated with the new/changed/ material) has increased in frequency. We often spot pages via the Exalead cache that have been recrawled/refreshed within a day or less.

To find the date of the last crawl/refresh, simply click the thumbnail image on a search results page and a cached version of the page will appear. The date is found on the top left of the cached page. Since Exalead is based in France, their crawl date is 6 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S.

Examples:
+ March 7th: RustyBrick.com

+ March 7th: Veoh (a video upload and sharing site)

+ March 7th: Sirus Satellite Radio, Music Weekly

+ March 6th: Bureau of Labor Statistics

+ March 6th: London School of Economics

+ March 6th: Department of Labor and Industry Home Page, State of Montana

However, other pages/sites that are updated regularly have not been recrawled and refreshed for some period of time.

+ April 1, 2006: Boeing News Releases: Commercial Airplanes

+ February 23, UNESCO

+ February 13, Library of Congress Webcasts

2) Since the Fall of 2005, Exalead has allowed users to personalize their Exalead home page with direct links to specific pages. Each entry includes a link and a thumbnail of the page. You can register and transport your favorites to any computer. Otherwise, they are kept on the specific computer using a cookie.

We’ve noticed a new feature on Exalead results pages that makes creating shortcuts and adding them to your personalized Exalead homepage very easy.

At the bottom of each result on a results page, look for the link labeled “Add to Shortcuts.” Click it, and that page will be added to your favorites on the Exalead homepage. You can also add shortcuts by clicking the link on the home page and entering the URL. You can move shortcuts by simply dragging them to a new location in the shortcut area of the page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 and is filed under Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.