Exalead is a French search engine involved in the Quaero project.

Exalead provides thumbnail previews of the target pages along with the results, and allows advanced refining on the results page (language, geographic location, file type, categories) but also further data refinement, such as rich content (audio, video, RSS) and related terms, allowing users to browse the web by serendipity.

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 70 people in 6 countries (in Paris, Milan, Weinheim in Germany, Glasgow, and New York).

Exalead.com specific features

Exalead attempts to add value to search results by displaying statistics and information about the results along the left-hand side of the page. This includes categorical and geographical information. Exalead’s features include:

* Proximity search supporting the NEAR operator
* Nested search expressions
* Tips
* Specific search
o by geographic location
o by language
o by file type
* Additional word suggestions
* Phonetic search is also available, which can be used when the orthography is not known
* Search within results
* Audio, video and RSS search (in the preview also pictures)
* Search in Wikipedia

Exalead allows search with regular expressions, which can be used to solve crosswords and used in information retrieval algorithms.

On March 2, 2006, Exalead.com indexed more than 4 billion pages.[citation needed] The interface was available in four languages (English, French, German, and Chinese, the latter of which is now removed).

On August 2, 2006, Exalead launched the beta version of its new interface, which is the default interface since the middle of October 2006. Spanish and Italian language support was added.

The index size, as of May 2007, is a little over 8 billion pages.

Contact Information

• Founded  2000
• Headquarters  Paris, France
• Industry  Internet
• Revenue  €8.3 million (2007)
• Employees  116
• Website  www.Exalead.com