French search engine Exalead acquired by Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes, a leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, acquires Exalead, a French search engine for about €135 million.

Exalead, the 'French Google'

Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead is a global providers of Search Platforms and Search-Based Applications (SBA) for consumer and business users.

Among Exalead’s worldwide clients, there are leading companies such as PriceWaterhouseCooper and Michelin. More than 100 million unique visitors use Exalead’s technology for search each month.

The company is involved in the Quaero project, an European technology consortium, mainly funded by the French government to develop multimedia search tools.

Reshaping the search engine landscape

Exalead has a platform to apply advanced semantic processing to Web-scale data. It brings structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate information cloud.

Contrary to other search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, Exalead is not largely known from the public yet.

Nevertheless, its thumbnail previews of the target pages along with the results, and its advanced refining on the results page (language, geographic location, file type, categories) seem very interesting tools to me.