Exalead is a snazzy search engine out of France that has some interesting features you won’t find with Google or Yahoo.

It has a clean interface entry.

There are a couple of excellent features. Advanced search offers fuzzy queries and a feature that’s great for crossword fans. The feature is called regular expressions. Let’s say I’m looking for a five letter word where the fourth is t and the first is p. I put in p…t. and the search engine pulls up the word.

Exalead also offers phonetic spelling for those of us who might not know how to spell the name of the leader of the PQ. It has an ability to search for frequently misspelled words.

It offers a thing called trundication. So typing in liber yields varients, library, libraries, librarian etc.

There are two problems. Country searches like Australia don’t yet yield full results. And being in beta, the engine hasn’t updated in five months. Search Engine Watch contacted Exlead’s CEO recently and a Monday report says the engine is refreshing it’s index and moving forward.

What I really like is the search screen. I’m given screen shots, relevant entries, tools to select relevant terms.

Here are the three examples of the page, using BDBO.
1) No screenshots
2) Right side screen shots
3) Full page screen shots

Related Terms, Related Categories and Document Type provide text or screen shot/URL seaching.

I hope Exalead works through it’s beta. This is a search engine that has some features I find useful.