Exalead

Search the Web with Exalead

What is Exalead?

Exalead is a good general purpose search engine, with lots of interesting features such as a personalized home page, filetype search, and individual site thumbnails available in search results. Exalead's search results also have a LOT to offer the searcher, as I'll detail in the next paragraph.

How To Search With Exalead

Exalead home page is simple and uncluttered. You'll see that you have the opportunity to add shortcuts to the home page; basically, this is your chance to add the sites that you go to most often and have them right there on the Exalead home page - a great incentive to make Exalead your home page, as well. I tried this and I was able to add a grand total of 18 sites to the home page; each one shows a screen shot of that particular site. [h2]Exalead Search Results

Exalead is a very visual search engine. For instance, my search results for cheese brought back a crowded search results page, but it's crowded for a good purpose. Basically, Exalead gives you so many great search options within the search results page that narrowing your search is simple.

To the left of the main results are Related Terms; in my case, it was cheese sauce, feta cheese, American cheese, etc. Underneath that are Related Categories-Home, Shopping, etc. Directly below Related Categories is Web Site Location, an interesting feature I haven't seen before; this enables you to separate out your results by location. Then Exalead offers Document Type search - simply click on the file type you'd like to search for - .pdf, .txt, .doc, .xls, .swf, .ppt, and .rtf - and presto! you've got search results only for that filetype. An excellent feature.

Exalead Search Options

Exalead also offers phonetic search, approximate search, and the opportunity to search within results; as well as a drop-down menu right next to the main search bar that gives searchers the ability to execute an approximate search, an exact search, or a stemming search.

If you look directly underneath the search bar on your search results page, you'll see even more Exalead search options. The small back button takes you back to your previous search results. The RSS button filters out results that come with an RSS feed (VERY nice feature!).

To the far right, you'll see three little squares within the gray bar underneath the main search query box. Click on these and you'll be able to change your search results display; text only, screenshots to the far right or search results displayed with images only.

Exalead Advanced Search and Preferences

There's really quite a bit of advanced search options available to you right on your search results page (as I detailed above), but if you want even more, check out the Exalead Advanced Search page. In addition, if you'd like to change how Exalead works for you, navigate to the Exalead User Preferences page.

Why Should I Use Exalead?

I was very impressed with Exalead and the breadth of search options it gives both the casual Web searcher and the experienced Web search guru. Give Exalead a try - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.