Today’s View is from the office of Francois Bourdoncle, President and CEO of Exalead.
While I founded Exalead nearly a decade ago in 2000, I have been involved in search from the very beginning. I watched the birth of search as an early researcher for AltaVista, where I focused on the LiveTopics project. A lot of things have changed during that time, but the one thing that has remained constant is the need for a simpler way to access information.

This is the very challenge Exalead aims to solve,
with both its Web search engine and its enterprise search product portfolio. We’ve invested significant resources to develop, evolve and patent Search by Serendipity®, a more natural approach to search whereby people can search the way they think. As a result, people can find what they are looking for, even if they don’t know how to formulate the question (i.e. query) properly.

Exalead’s Search by Serendipity®
approach is embodied in our innovative navigation technology that has been at the very heart of exalead one:search™, our fully unified search platform, from day one. For every search query, Exalead automatically provides a list of related categories (i.e. file type, language, location, directory) and/or related terms alongside the results page. Users can then easily click on any of those categories or terms to broaden or narrow the search results.

Since the launch of our new interface last year,
Exalead has been steadily gaining traffic (approximately one million unique visitors each month). We’ve indexed more than 8 billion Web pages – a significant milestone – positioning us as the third largest Web search engine based solely on size of index.

The sheer size of the Web
is currently estimated to be larger than 100 billion documents, and, as a result, scalability and database size come into play as key factors. With our 64-bit architecture, Exalead is best positioned to scale to accommodate the future growth of the Web. But other factors are also important, such as the criteria used to select the pages that are included in the index as well as the ranking of search results is key.

Most recently, Exalead released new image, video and Wikipedia vertical search applications – all of which lend themselves well to Exalead’s Search by Serendipity® model. We look forward to releasing new vertical search applications in the coming months. As the Web becomes more complex and heterogeneous, Exalead’s approach is poised to become the search method of choice for discovering all of its available information.