Exalead and Clusty Search Engine
If you have been one of the living for the past 5 to 8 years, you already know about Google’s domination of the search engine world. When I cannot find something, Google usually has the answer. But, there are times when I need to look outside the box. This is the time where I pull out my 2 favorite engines that not too many people talk about.
Exalead
Exalead is a French search engine and global software provider for web enterprise entities. Their homepage resembles Opera browser’s Speed Dial function. You are presented with the option to create 8 quick links to web sites of your choosing. Go ahead and sign up for an account! Their results can sometimes lead to arbitrary results, however is usually why I visit the site. Another great feature on Exalead is the ability to view your search via thumbnails. You can generally view a thumbnail for each search result before clicking on it. And, even when you do end up clicking on it, the page opens up in a frame. No commitment! I love it.
Clusty
Next we come to Clusty. Clusty is a metasearch engine, which means that instead of keeping an indexing the web, Clusty queries and aggregates results from other major search engines such as Open Directory, MSN, Ask, and others. I will not go into the pros and cons of meta engines, but to say that they simply hitch a ride from other engines without doing all of the work. Since Clusty accesses around a half-dozen engines and actively crawls sites like AP and The New York Times, they seem to get the best of both worlds. A cool feature of this engine is that you can search for sites or keywords in just Blogs, jobs, government, or you can customize where your results are obtained. I have no complaints just yet. But, give me time.
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