I don’t how many of you have heard of a search engine called exalead. It has been around since 2004, but I think it has some cool features and it works so well for resume searches that I thought it was worth mentioning for those of you who may not have heard of it.

Some of the particular things I like about exalead is that it does something unusual with the asterisk (*) not only does it let you use it at the end of a word for truncation purposes like manag* finds manager, managing, management etc. but also in allows you to use the asterisk in the middle of a word using pattern matching as in psych.*ist - finds psychologist, psychiatrist, pyschotherapist.

Also it allows for the use of the bolean operator NEAR, which in their instance finds words within 16 terms of one another as a default or use NEAR/n which finds words within n number of terms one another as in the following example - Oracle NEAR/3 developer

It does approximate spelling with the command “spellslike:”, and phonetic searches with the command “soundslike:”. It does some other interesting things but then I better let you explore.