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two words :
Exalead
Yauba

Exalead is more powerful, and Yauba is a little less effective for specific search like "gentoo bug kernel 2.6.30 fglrx", but guarantees 100% anon, and is pretty powerful and useful in some cases.

Google is not the better search engine on the web, their new engine is very good, but google itself hasn't envolve since... I don't know, it's always the same, and we barely see new features added. (take a look at exdalead labs).

After testing several search engines, it appears that google is not the one with the best ideas, and that pertinence and engines of others like exalead aren't bad enough to consider them inferior to google. Google is the most known, and others well known like bing are not as powerful as those two less-known search engines.

Exalead.com offers enterprise solutions to organize and better exploit what they call "the Extended Informational Assets" of the enterprise, including "information on the web, including blogs, e-mails, RSS feeds, etc." This is for the enterprise to organize structured and non-structured data from heterogeneous sources, internal and external to the enterprise, and better exploit said data for decision making processes to give them a better competitive edge. This EIA includes comments, blogs, etc., on the interenet. Such solutions are called BIMS (Business Intelligence Management Systems). Clearly Comcast must using such a system. Personally, I'd like to buy stock in Exalead. Soon, every company will be using this stuff. Is it an invasion of privacy? Not if you've publicly posted something on the internet. Now, PAY ATTENTION COMCAST: I'm satisfied with the services I purchase from you. They work as they are intended to, and I have no complaint there, but, What's up with the prices? You offer affordable package deals, triple play for $99/month, etc., but, there are dozens of hidden charges, and the price doesn't stay the same. A year after switching in, and after even having cut half the TV channels and other services I initially purchased, I'm paying c. $200.00/month, for this triple play that you are still advertising for $99.00 a month. What gives? Also, when we initiated use of your services, we were told we had 8 hrs of international phone calls included, which was then cut to 4 hours, and, then the service simply disappeared. When we called asking why international calls are now appearing on our bill, you deny having ever offered this service.... Your services work fine, IMHO, but, your pricing practices are dishonest. We're considering Vonage and DirectTV, now, solely based on your pricing fiasco. I'd rather stick with your services, and the convenience of one bill, but, I don't like feeling like I've been lied to and cheated.

I followed a bit this 'Quaero' quest and it seems that:

- Public funding has not yet started and is not likely to start (french elections, EU commission blocking, etc ...)

- Even though no public $$ has been spent yet, Exalead, a Quaero member, already has a Web search engine, with a few billion pages, and some nice features. (thumbnails and automatic clustering)

Conclusion: this Quaero project is a french politic vaporware, BUT any private french or european company may still have a chance to produce something interesting for the search engine market. Even if they're french ;)

Or you could try Teoma (owned by Ask), Exalead (an up and comming French search engine with a number of cool features), GigaBlast (a suprisingly good search built pretty much by one man!) or Wisenut (a search engine owned by Looksmart).

Another good idea is to use one of the Meta search engines. Personally I think Clusty (created by Vivismo) is the best and from your persective has the advantage of not using Google data. Otherwise many people swear by Dogpile (you can switch off Google as a source for results).

Also, many people forget about directories like ODP, which for certain subjects and topics work better than search engines. And whilst on the subject of internet community created resources, more often than not I find the answers I need on good old Wikipedia.

You know it is funny, for a website obsessed with alternative Operating Systems and browsers we don't hear much about alternative ways of finding information. It seems like many people here think the web would impload if Google disappeared. Yeah they are cool and have had some nifty ideas but it is actually suprisingly easy to get by without them.

Exalead has been founded by the guys who developped Altavista's "Live Topics" feature and have a strong background in search technologies.

Hmmm--his publications don't show a strong background in search technologies. It's also not a strong recommendation that they have a CEO with a technical background (in programming languages, not search) but no startup business experience, and don't have any technical personnel.

I find it quite strange that the French president would just kind of pick this company and declare it to be "the European search engine". Was there any public review? Any business vetting? Why did these people end up getting picked?

The core search engine will be based on Exalead 's search engine. Exalead has been founded by the guys who developped Altavista's "Live Topics" feature and have a strong background in search technologies. As of today their engine just reached the 3 billion pages milestone, and is still growing. They also provide some nice features like the NEAR operator, clean clustering and even phonetic search. Worth a try !

Actually there IS a real search engine behind Quaero. It is called Exalead and their Web search engine has just reached the 3 billion pages milestone (they claim to have 4 billion by the end of January). They provide some quite interesting features like dynamic clustering (topics, countries and language), a NEAR search operator, phonetic search and even regular expression searches (try searching for /.ic..s.ft/ ... crosswords players are gonna love this feature :p) Definitely worth a try

Do you know Exalead ?
Their performance is quite good on this example :

webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7.html Contains answer
www.wedding-accessories.com/CP/beach-flamingo.html Contains answer
www.cat1234.com/id56.htm Links to answer
www.education-world.com/a-curr/curr020.shtml

So behind Google, but better than Yahoo! or MSN