Exalead is a French search engine involved in the
Quaero project.
Background about the search engine as per Wikipedia:
The company is a société anonyme based in Paris and founded in 2000 by François Bourdoncle. Its name comes from the association between
- the prefix exa which means 1018 (used as a generic term for size, to imply large coverage of pages)
- and the verb lead (as the customer is led through the search options)
Exalead tries to integrate research functions in one piece of software, combining Internet, desktop and enterprise functionality.
Exalead employs approximately 100 people in 6 countries (Paris in France, Milano in Italy, Weinheim in Germany, Glasgow in UK and New York in the United States).
What is interesting about this small engine is that it seems to be popping up everywhere as of late. First, I noticed that my
Web CEO SEO software now incorporates
Exalead within many of its ranking, backlink and saturation functionality. Then I noticed that Wikipedia has even included it as one of its search engines -
click here to see (click drop down menu). What is interesting to me is that
Ask (which is a bigger engine with more marketshare) is not included.
Finally, seeing an opportunity to get some additional exposure and possibly some new customers on the enterprise search side,
Exalead has decided to take on
Microsoft. The recent
announcement of
Microsoft's intent to purchase the enterprise search company
FAST has opened an opportunity to grab some of
FAST's potentially upset or concerned customers.
Exalead announced a new migration program called
Accelerate With Exalead that's designed specifically to help OEMs that tailor
FAST for enterprise customers migrate to
Exalead. The funny thing to me is that
Exalead just announced (12/28/2007) that they had become a
Microsoft Partner.
I would love to see
Exalead become a major player, especially with
Microsoft potentially taking over Yahoo and the pool of major search engines dwindling, but they still have a long way to go. I hope that
Exalead keeps up its aggressive tactics, increases the size of its index and works on its search results relevancy which could ultimately make it the little engine that did.
