Priceless Paintings from W7

You’ll all know Google, of course. Even the Oxford Dictionary knows about “to google,” a remarkable accomplishment and clever marketing. Few other companies have impacted daily life of so many people so severely, and so quickly.

However, one should never forget that others are really, really, keen to get a slice of Google’s market share, and thus breed pretty daughters, too.

Through some strange coincidence, I discovered Exalead recently. A strange name that won’t ever enter the English language and the Oxford Dictionary, but what the heck?

Hmm, pretty much like Google, I thought. Since Wolfram caused nothing but hype and disappointment so far, and because it was lunch time, I took a closer look.

Oh. Nice! Fast returns, and a nice clickable tool on the far right to narrow down the search. (Others have also found Exalead noteworthy.) The speed will probably reduce as their index and user base builds up, but for now, it’s really nice.

Next, I looked into the free Exalead desktop search tool (EDS) – Google Desktop Search (GSD)struggled with Outlook integration for some while now, and not having shares in Google, I felt free to try Exalead.

Oh. Nice, again! Super-fast indexing, and much better local search results than any other desktop search engine that I tried before. Although slower than GDS, EDS offers a superb tool to narrow down the local search results, much better than all the others.

I was just about to become an Exalead convert when I found out that the Internet search results simply weren’t as good as Google’s (although they were the second best that I have seen so far). Desktop search was brilliant, but incompatible with an essential software tool needed in my work (the Perforce source control client), so I had to give up on Exalead all together.

They never bothered to say Thank you when I told them about the incompatibility, so I guess it serves them right. T’is French anyway.

Web/Tech Google, search engine;, Semantic Web, Web Revolution, wolfram