PCWorld

Exalead Desktop, Version 4.6

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Exalead is built around an intuitive, browser-based interface that's modeled after the company's Web search portal. This convenient design lets you search your desktop and external Web sites from one place.

(See Related Slideshow: Desperately Seeking Desktop Data)

Best desktop search tools

For a free product, Exalead Desktop is no slouch. It recognizes more than 120 file formats, including Microsoft Office, PDF, OpenOffice; a variety of image, audio and video files; plus HTML, XML and Adobe Flash. Furthermore, the software indexes e-mail, attachments, and notes from Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Mozilla Thunderbird and Lotus Notes. I had no issues using Internet Explorer 8, Apple Safari 4, and Firefox 3.6 with Exalead.

Similar to other vendors, Exalead offers a licensed enterprise server product (price quoted based on configuration), Exalead CloudView. It collects structured and unstructured data from most any source within an organization and allows it to be searched from the single browser interface. In the middle you'll find the Professional Edition ($60 per user). It indexes more than 300 file formats, offers IT departments managed deployment, and integrates with Stellent content management systems (part of Oracle).

Exalead is a small download and ready for work in a few minutes. After selecting the folders to index, the system completed its initial crawl in about 30 minutes. There's no limit to the number of documents - and content can be stored on local hard disks, network drives, and attached storage, such as USB drives.

Exalead is specially optimized for multi-core or multi-processor PCs. This architecture enables real-time indexing without degraded performance to keep results up-to-date. For instance, I found an e-mail that I was in the middle of writing.

After performing a search, the main display shows a thumbnail image, text summary and details about the file or message. File-type icons and document previews with the search term highlighted further help you judge whether you've found the right document without opening it.

Most important, Exalead was one of the early pioneers in faceted (or pivot) navigation of search results, and that design continues to distinguish the product. This means you refine searches by clicking on related terms or classifications that appear in a navigation panel. For example, you could narrow results to show just those e-mail messages from a colleague - or find documents created on a specific date.

Exalead approaches advanced search differently from most other products. Instead of a form with a lot of options, you get one pop-up form with about 20 possible options. Say you want to perform a phonetic spelling. If you click that option, Exalead automatically fills in the correct syntax within the search box (soundslike:) and you simply type the word. Additionally, a built-in spell checker learns from the terms in your documents, which helps eliminate spelling errors in search queries.

The free version has some good security, which is important in a business setting, especially where employees share computers. For instance, it respects the access rights for the user who is logged in, so results won't include private files of others. And the software does not index cached or secure Web pages.

Exalead provides a surprising number of features that are surrounded by rich navigation that helps a user quickly refine results. If you go with the no-cost download, it's hard to argue with the value it provides.

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Microsoft Pins its Browser Hopes on IE9

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:02:00 +0000

I reported earlier on the operating system share gains for Microsoft Windows 7 as reported by Janco Associates. But the other half of the Janco report measured Web browser share, which I want to address in this post not just for what it says about Internet Explorer, but how it also handicaps rival browsers.(See also "As Internet Explorer Turns 15, We Take a Look Back.")

Janco pegged IE's market share at 66.07 percent in August, down 4.54 percentage points from 70.61 percent in August 2009. That's actually more generous than share numbers from the often-cited Netmarketshare, which put IE's share at 60.74 percent in July, its most recent report. IE recovered in June from a dip below the 60 percent percent mark in April and May, according to Netmartketshare.

But while that uptick might offer Microsoft some temporary relief, Janco's historical view is that "Microsoft's browser market has continued to decay." To be sure, IE has seen better days such in early 2005 when it had 90.61 percent share. Free and open source Mozilla Firefox was just a puppy in 2005 with a 4.44 percent share and Google Chrome was two years away from being launched.

This month, Firefox is at 18.6 percent and Chrome at 6.24 percent but they each have their own sets of issues in Janco's view.

Firefox grew only slightly from 16.23 percent in August 2009 and had been as high as 21.23 percent in January of that year. Janco notes: "The novelty and uniqueness of its features have worn off and have been duplicated by IE ... and Google Chrome." The Mozilla Foundation released a beta of Firefox 4.0 in July.

Google Chrome has got the strongest momentum, doubling its market share this year from 3.19 percent last year. But Janco says one factor limiting Chrome is that it doesn't work on all sites. Janco didn't provide further details on that in the limited free version of it's white paper; more information is likely in the paid version. Google released a beta of Chrome 6 Aug. 12.

All of this brings us to IE 9, a beta version of which Microsoft will unveil at an event September 15 in San Francisco. Janco lauded IE 8 as being "feature rich and a step ahead of the other browsers," but withheld judgment on IE 9, which is only available today in preview mode.

The fact of the matter is that the browser market has changed permanently since IE's days of 90 percent plus market share, when Netscape was beaten by Microsoft's competitive practices -- practices ruled an illegal monopoly by the United States. Today, Firefox and Chrome are entrenched competitors, despite their own issues, along with Opera, Apple's Safari and others.

Initial reports are positive about IE 9's potential as a faster browser than IE 8. But it's going to be under a lot of pressure to get Microsoft's browser market share numbers headed in the right direction.

Firefox 4: The Browser to Beat

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:26:00 +0000

The latest Firefox beta is a very impressive piece of work, in large part because of its new Panorama feature. It's clearly become the top browser of all. Here's why Chrome, Internet Explorer, and all the rest have a lot of catching up to do.

Panorama, just released in the latest beta of Firefox 4, is one of the best browser features to come along in a long time. In essence, it tames tabs using a Mac OS X Expose-like interface. With it, you group tabs into different sets, and you browse, you only use tabs in a specific set. So you can have a news set, a music set, and so on. That way, it's easy to find the exact tab you want, rather than having to hunt through 20 open ones. You only see the handful in your current group.

It's the best tab-handling feature I've ever seen, and one of the best browser productivity-enhancers I've used. For more details, see my Computerworld review "Firefox 4 Beta 4 opens a new Panorama."

Also useful is Firefox Sync, which synchronizes all of your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history and open tabs among multiple computers and devices running Firefox. It's not quite as useful as the Xmarks browser add-in, because Xmarks works with multiple browsers. But it does something that Xmarks can't do --- let you view and open tabs running on other computers running Firefox.Firefox Sync is still a bit rough around the edges, but still extremely useful.

Beta 4 also includes the various features introduced previously in Firefox 4, such as speedier browsing, a better add-ons manager, and a Chrome-like interface that puts tabs across the top of the browser. Until the beta of Firefox 4, the browser had been starting to look old and tired. No longer. It looks as if for now it's the best browser out there.

6 Free Browser-Based Casual Games You Shouldn't Miss

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:56:00 +0000

Stumbling on troves of browser-based casual games is easy. Sorting the wheat from the chaff (and let's face it, there's a lot of the latter) takes time.

Our own Laura Blackwell has done just that ("Free Casual Games to Play in Your Browser"), drawing from a recent casual-oriented game design competition to highlight six praiseworthy games--including the winner--with reviews to peruse in the bargain.

The contest's theme was to design something "SANDBOX." Longtime gamers will probably associate that term with something in the Grand Theft Auto tradition, where you can roam anywhere in giant "play" areas at leisure.

In the competition's case, the designers opted for a somewhat more literal approach.

In "A Llama, a World and a Plan," for instance, you play a llama with blue blood aspirations. In "Sand Trap," you have to tilt grains of sand from a maze into a bucket using physics-based principles.

And in the contest winner, "Submachine: 32 Chambers," you'll explore a sand-suffused Mesoamerican ruin, spelunking for objects and deciphering sophisticated logic puzzles.

Have a look for yourself. All you need is a few minutes and a Flash or Javascript-enabled browser.

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