Traffic Flow SEO

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

Background about the search engine as per Wikipedia:

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 100 people in 6 countries (Paris in France, Milano in Italy, Weinheim in Germany, Glasgow in UK and New York in the United States).

What is interesting about this small engine is that it seems to be popping up everywhere as of late. First, I noticed that my Web CEO SEO software now incorporates Exalead within many of its ranking, backlink and saturation functionality. Then I noticed that Wikipedia has even included it as one of its search engines - click here to see (click drop down menu). What is interesting to me is that Ask (which is a bigger engine with more marketshare) is not included.

Finally, seeing an opportunity to get some additional exposure and possibly some new customers on the enterprise search side, Exalead has decided to take on Microsoft. The recent announcement of Microsoft's intent to purchase the enterprise search company FAST has opened an opportunity to grab some of FAST's potentially upset or concerned customers. Exalead announced a new migration program called Accelerate With Exalead that's designed specifically to help OEMs that tailor FAST for enterprise customers migrate to Exalead. The funny thing to me is that Exalead just announced (12/28/2007) that they had become a Microsoft Partner.

I would love to see Exalead become a major player, especially with Microsoft potentially taking over Yahoo and the pool of major search engines dwindling, but they still have a long way to go. I hope that Exalead keeps up its aggressive tactics, increases the size of its index and works on its search results relevancy which could ultimately make it the little engine that did.