Phil Bradley's weblog

Exalead Laboratories

I've been playing around with the Exalead Exalabs site for a while, and thought I'd share my discoveries. In common with the Google labs site Exalead has been playing around with, and exploring a variety of different search concepts, and their experiments are available for the rest of us to play with.

The first of these is the 'Constellations' option; the link takes you to an English language search page for 'library'. We're shown something very similar to the screenshot below:

 

It's quite similar to the Kartoo interface that I looked at the other day; mouse over a result and see more detail about the page. Unfortunately however, that's primarily what this resource does - it'll identify a particular site/page, but it doesn't show any kind of context, so it's necessary to click on the link. Obviously Google and Bing in particular are rather more helpful than this. There's an option to refine the results, so my library search resulted in refinements such as public, digital or academic libraries. I could also choose to limit/change the search to 'people', but I was somewhat surprised to see results for 'Jesus' so I think a bit more work needs to be done there. There are options to move around the screen, enlarge/decrease the view and a sidebar to pull out a text version. Interestingly it simply wouldn't work for me in IE8, but what fine in Firefox. In summary - an interesting experiment, and probably wise to keep it in a 'laboratory' at the moment. Finally, they have a twitter account for the developers.

The second experiment is Miiget which is a celebrity search option. Search for a star, and have them displayed at the centre of a cloud of results - I tried Clint Eastwood and the entry was surrounding by other actors, directors and characters. Slightly disappointed that there wasn't an image of Eastwood - that can't be difficult to find, surely?

 

A fun option is the 'relation' between famous people, though I've got to say it was thin at times. I tried a link between Eastwood and Mother Teresa. It went like this: Eastwood to Harry S Truman (President Truman is featured in the 2006 Clint Eastwood movie Flags of Our Fathers, where he is played by American actor David Patrick Kelly.) to John F Kennedy (He was a congressman for six years but had a mixed voting record, often diverging from President Harry S. Truman and the rest of the Democratic Party.) to Mother Teresa (Kennedy came in third (behind Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa) in a Gallup list of the most admired people of the twentieth century.). Yes. well. 

Chromatik is an image/colour search engine. Start with a search, choose saturation (colorful or grey), then luminosity (bright or dark) and hue. Finally an answer to the question - it was a red book! This one isn't at all bad, and stacks up well against the Google and Bing offerings.

Karen's done a more indepth view of this and other image/colour search tools in her blog which you might want to take a look at. 

There's also an 'Exalead Lite' version, which looks similar to the normal version, but doesn't have any advanced search option, and the refine feature is rather more limited. 

Then there's Tweepz which I liked. Basically it's another people finder - listing biography, avatar, URL, followers/following, with a really nice refine feature that I've not seen before, allowing you to limit to number of followers/following, language and 'extracted entities' which are search dependent. Useful options if you want to find some authoritative individuals to follow in a particular subject area for example.

 

Next up is Voxalead, which finds keywords in transcriptions of video. I have to say that I was very impressed with this resource - it does exactly what you'd imagine. Run your search and the video clips appear on the screen, choose the one that you're interested in and the video starts a few moments before your word(s) appear to put it into some sort of context.

 

The range of sources is disappointingly small at the moment - mainly major US and French resources, but given that this is just in the labs, that's fair enough.

The final option was something called Wikifier which I wasn't impressed with. The idea is that you type in a URL and Wikifier loads the page and puts in links to appropriate Wikipedia entries, and highlights them for you. However, a political reference to US lead to a link to the US Womens football team, and a football reference to Newcastle led to an entry on the city. This needs lots of work!

So there you have it - a quick roundup of the Exalead lab experiments, ranging from the really interesting and useful to the not so much. Do have an explore if you get the chance!

Finding the Exalead search engine

If you're trying to find the Exalead search engine - which I thoroughly recommend, you might be finding it a touch difficult. A search for www.exalead.com will redirect you to www.exalead.com/search which is all about the company, without a search box in sight. (The link to the search engine is bottom left). The same thing happens if you try the UK site. In order to get to the search engine you need to go to http://www.exalead.co.uk/search which really isn't helpful.

I really don't understand the reasoning behind this - while I accept that Exalead wants to emphasis the work they're doing with Enterprise search, to make it so difficult to find the search engine isn't going to be getting more people to use it! Please reconsider your home page approach - or at least, reposition the link to the search page towards the top of the page so that people can find it. Exalead has, in my view, a great chance to take over from Ask if they play their cards right, but this isn't helping.

Exalead Halloween Logo

Exalead Halloween Logo
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.

Danny has done a great job of finding Halloween logos over at SearchEngine Land listing logos for Google, Ask, and Yahoo - here's another that I found for Exalead. Most of the other search engines haven't really entered into the spirit of the thing though.

Exalead updates

Exalead has been busy recently. I've just been talking to Raymond Bentinck, who is their UK Managing Director. Note the 'UK' element there. Exalead has a UK version available now, and they've also recently started a blog which made its debut in March. Raymond was particularly keen to point out the ability to search the Wikipedia. I also liked the ability to run an image search and choose the 'face' option. Although it doesn't always get it right, it's not at all bad.

As regular readers of my blog will know - I like Exalead and find it a superior search engine in many ways to ummm... a certain other engine that's commonly used. If you've not yet tried it, then do use this opportunity to give it a go.