Exalead

» see exalead.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Francois Bourdoncle worked at Digital's Paris research lab in the AltaVista years and built the refinement layer, the part that let you take a bad result set and cut it down instead of retyping. In 2000 he founded Exalead with Patrice Bertin to do that properly, with its own crawler and its own index rather than somebody else's. By the middle of the decade Exabot was walking about eight billion pages, which put a Paris company inside a club that had roughly four members worldwide.

The public site at exalead.com/search was the shop window. It gave you a thumbnail image of every result, a sidebar of file types and languages you could click to narrow the list, and a set of operators that worked. Google in 2006 gave you ten blue links and a spelling correction. Exalead looked like what search engines look like now, about ten years early, and it was free to anyone who typed the address.

On 8 June 2010 Dassault Systemes bought the company for 135 million euros. The buyer makes CAD software for aircraft and cars, and what it wanted was CloudView, the indexing platform underneath, so it could sell search across engineering document stores. That is a real business, and the public web engine was no part of it. From that day the search box ran as a leftover.

~ the chronicle ~

~ facets, ten years early ~

Faceted search is the term, and in 2006 nobody outside library software used it on the open web. You searched, and down the left side Exalead offered to restrict you to PDFs, or to French pages, or to one domain, or to results from before a date. Each click narrowed the set rather than starting a new query. The thumbnail preview beside each result was the other trick, and it survives today in every image-heavy results page.

There was also a desktop version that indexed your own machine with the same engine, from the era when full-text search of your own hard drive was a product you had to go and install. As an engineer this was the appealing part: not the results quality, which was fine and not better than Google, but that a company with a few dozen people had built a working crawler and query language and then let anybody hit it.

~ the state money ~

In 2005 Chirac and Schroder announced Quaero, a Franco-German program to build European search technology, and Exalead was one of five industrial leads on it. The politics of that project were louder than the engineering. Germany walked out at the start of 2007 to run its own program under the name Theseus, on the stated grounds that the two sides wanted different things, and Quaero carried on as a French research effort that never produced a search engine anybody used.

Exalead came out of that period as the thing Quaero was chartered to produce and already had. France had a working independent web index, staffed and crawling, five years before the state program it was attached to gave up on the goal. In 2010 the index went to an industrial software group.

~ the day it stopped ~

There is no announcement, no farewell page and no trade report. What exists is the Internet Archive. On 24 February 2024 www.exalead.com/search still returned the search page with a working input box labeled Search the web and a row of bookmark thumbnails. On 13 March 2024 the same address returned a redirect, and every capture from that day to this one is a redirect. Today it lands on a Dassault marketing page.

Twenty-four years of crawler, and the only record of the last day is a status code changing from 200 to 302 somewhere in a three-week window. Wikipedia lists the company as defunct in 2014, which is when the brand stopped being a company. The search engine outlasted that by a decade because switching it off was never anybody's job.

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