Exalead: An Interesting Search Engine

After reading an interesting column by Mary Ellen Bates in EContent about Google falling behind in offering advanced tools for searching and results filtering, I tried out one of the alternative search engines she recommended: Exalead. This engine offers in one place a lot of nifty features not all found in one web search tool:

• word stemming
• phonetic search (will search for words that sound like the ones you type)
  
• proximity searching (within 16 words)
  
• clustering of results
• thumbnail images of pages in search results
• suggestions of related terms
• clickable filters for document/file types (e.g., you can winnow search results list to only PDFs, or only DOCs, or only PPTs, etc.

Here's a sample search for "death with dignity." As you can see, the list of related terms on the left side of the search results page is fairly comprehensive. The "related terms" feature alone may make this useful when trying help students brainstorm about other keywords to consider.

There's no pretending Exalead has as large an index as Google. The range of features, though, offered on Exalead's search results page (as well as on its advanced search page) make it an attractive alternative (especially considering that right now, as far as I know, it is the only engine that allows for proximity searching