Search Applications - Exalead

Exalead provides search platforms and search-based applications. Search-based applications (SBA) are software applications in which a search engine platform is used as the core infrastructure for information access and reporting. SBAs use semantic technologies to aggregate, normalize and classify unstructured, semi-structured and/or structured content across multiple repositories, and employ natural language technologies for accessing the aggregated information.

Exalead has a platform that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning, and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information overload.

The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.

Exalead products include the CloudView platform and the ii Solutions Suite of packaged SBAs, all built on the same powerful CloudView platform.

Exalead CloudView

Exalead CloudView enables organizations to meet demands for real time, in-context, accurately delivered information, accessed from diverse web and enterprise big data sources, yet delivered faster and with cost less than with traditional application architectures. This platform is used for both online and enterprise SBAs as well as enterprise search.

Available for on-premises or cloud delivery, Exalead CloudView is the infrastructure that powers all Exalead solutions, including Exalead’s public web search engine, the company’s custom SBAs, and the Exalead ii Solution Suite of packaged, vertical SBAs.

Exalead ii Solutions Suite

Exalead ii ("information intelligence”) applications are packaged, workflow specific SBAs that transform large volumes of heterogeneous, multi-source data into meaningful, real time information intelligence, and deliver that information intelligence in context to users to improve business processes.

On the data side, the Exalead information infrastructure uses semantic technologies to non-intrusively aggregate, align and enhance multi-source data to create a powerful base of actionable knowledge (i.e., information intelligence).

Exalead Advanced Search options appear as a drop-down menu below the search form, where users select the search criteria that will be entered directly into the search form. A different set of advanced search options is available for each search type.

Registered users can select the "Bookmark" option below for any search results to add these results to a list of saved sites, accessible on the Exalead homepage as a collection of image thumbnails.

Strengths:

• truncation, proximity, and many other advanced operators not available from other search engines;
• includes thumbnails of pages;
• provides excellent narrowing options on right side.

Exalead appears to support Boolean operators and nested searching with the operators AND, OR, and NOT. Either AND, OR or NOT can be used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. Operators must be in upper case. Exalead can also use "for NOT" but only when it is not used along with the Boolean operators. In the Advanced Search, it also has drop-down choices for "containing," "not containing," and "preferably containing." There is also an OPT operator which means that the word following it is an optional word.

Phrase searching is available by using "double quotes" around a phrase. It also supports a NEXT operator for ordered proximity of one word (in other words, the same thing as a phrase search.) So "double quotes" should get the same results as double NEXT quotes. Exalead also supports the NEAR operator for 16 word proximity. You can change it to NEAR/5 (or any other number) to specify a different proximity value.

Exalead's Advanced Search also offer some unusual types of special searches:

• phonetic spelling with the sounds like: operator;
• approximate spelling with the spells like: operator;
• regular expression using regex syntax.

On a search with two or more words, stemming is automatic. Exalead also supports truncation using an asterisk * symbol. Stemming is also controlled on the preferences page. Exalead has no case sensitive searching. Using either lower or upper or mixed case will result in the same results. Exalead supports a title search.

Exalead has limits for language, country, file type, site, and date available on the Advanced Search page. The file type limit includes text, PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Rich Text Format, Corel WordPerfect, and Shockwave Macromedia Flash. You can place the file type search command into the search box. The Advanced Search page offers a site limit, which can be used to limit results to those from the specified domain. The language limit is available in the Advanced Search.

Some common words such as 'a,' 'the' and 'in' are ignored, but they can be searched with a + in front. Within a phrase search, all words are searched.

Results are sorted by a relevance algorithm. Pages are also clustered by site. Only one page per site will be displayed. Others are available via the yellow folder and domain name. The Advanced Search page used to include two date sort options, but those disappeared with the new interface in October 2006. They are still available via the field prefix of sort. Two options are available: sort:new and sort:old.

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