Las 10 razones por las que Exalead (mencionado como Quaero) va a fracasar, extraidas de Quaero: 10 reasons why the French search engine will fail (Loïclemeur):

Un nombre difícil de pronunciar (eso era antes, ya que ahora es Exalead):

1- Can’t spell it.
How can you trust a project that has not been even able to get its domain name and that nobody can spell right

Es un proyecto centralizado:

2- Centralized.
There are no centralized projects on the web that succeed. The web is a web and decentralized by essence. Look at Firefox and the way it takes market share against the centralized Internet Explorer, look at Wikipedia

Un factor muy positivo para un proyecto web es ofrecer una versión beta anterior a su lanzamiento (al estilo de GMail, Writely, Flickr, etc.). De esa forma la gente lo conoce (la gente habla del asunto), cuenta con un montón de usuarios probando el servicio y notificando errores y posibles mejoras:

3- Secret versus beta.
There are no successful secret projects anymore. With 60 million bloggers out there and the dramatic shift from an era of vertical communication into a many-to-many conversation, you have to build your products with the consumers using beta versions, going live and improving the product as you go, not in secret.

4- No buzz, no adoption.
Darwinism is the way the web goes and darwinism is the way startups go. At the very beginning you can feel immediately if an idea or an innovative project is catching up. Look at Skype, 100 million users without advertising but a huge conversational buzz since launch. Nobody knows what Quaero does and what it is exactly, when it will be released. Worse, if you search, you find Exalead, a french search engine supposed to be “better than Google” but that few people use.

Subvenciones y bajo nivel de innovación. Es un proyecto subvencionado, por lo que nace muerto: la subvención mata a la innovación.

5- A galaxy of actors who compete to get the subventions and don’t get much noticed for their latest web innovations
About 25 organisations are involved in Quaero, mostly french. Even though many have excellent reputation, none of them are really known for their innovation around the web today, I mean around the latest standards RSS, conversations, tags, etc. Of course there is Lycos Europe but is Lycos still on the cutting edge of Internet initiatives ?

No es internacional (aunque probando el buscador parece que esto lo está solventando, aunque no tiene interfaz en español):

6- Not really international.
Quaero is introduced by Jacques Chirac as a Franco-German initiative when Deutsche Telecom has already announced it will not take an active role anymore but just be an observer. It looks much more like a French patriotic initiative.

Plazos de desarrollo excesivamente extensos. Y en Internet las cosas cambian demasiado rápido:

7- A neverending story.
Quaero has been announced as a 5 years project when Google is only barely 8 years old, where will Google be in 5 years when Quaero is finally launched ? In a French podcast, François Bourdoncle, President of Exalead, a company that is said to lead the “multiple heads missile” as he calls the “programme Quaero” admits he does not even know when it should be launched. It was supposed to be introduced in January 2006 and we are still waiting.

Inversión mínima: solo una cuarta parte de lo que Microsoft invierte en MSN Search, y Google le gana de largo a MSN Search:

8- Not enough euros.
Microsoft barely exists in Search marketshare against Google with his MSN Search. Still, it will invest 1.1 billion $ in 2005 only on search against 260 M€ on 5 years for the French engine. Google generated more than $2 billion in revenues last quarter… We’re launching a competitor which will be five years late with fifty times less money…

Hay dinero público de por medio, un factor que siempre (o casi) anula la capacidad de innovación:

9- Subventions euros are not worth venture capital euros.
Maybe Jacques Chirac was not told that Yahoo! and Google were created by Stanford students in their rooms. Sure Jacques Chirac was not told either that they were financed by venture capitalists. People who know the industry, know how fast it goes and help the startups as they grow on a daily basis. They also fight against each other to invest in the next round or decide to sell or let the company die if it fails. Subventions are allocated in a totally different way. Too much politics involved in who will get the “euro shower” and not enough results driven.

10- Google is a thousand startups
These are only a few of the ongoing Google projects. The entire company operates as a thousand startups as employees who have ideas are encouraged to launch them in-house. That is why it is so innovative. How many european startups could the Government help launch if these 250 M€ were invested in them ?

Saber más:

• Diez razones por las que Quaero fracasará
• Quaero: 10 reasons why the French search engine will fail
• Quaeroless? Exalead CEO Says There’ll Be No Quaero Site

Actualizado 2006-11-15

Tags Technorati: exalead, buscadores, internet, recuperacion de informacion, innovacion.

Exalead es un buscador de Internet radicado en Francia, el cual parece ser que proviene del proyecto de Quaero.

He aquí algunas de sus características más interesantes:

• Operador de proximidad (NEAR), para que las palabras de la búsqueda estén más cerca unas de otras.
• Búsqueda específica por localización geográfica, idioma o tipo de documento.
• Sugerencia de términos de búsqueda adicionales.
• Búsqueda fonética, para cuando no se conoce la ortografía de alguna palabra.
• Búsqueda dentro de los resultados
• Información adicional por cada resultado.

En cuanto al índice en Ojobuscador aparece que son unos 8.000 millones de páginas.

Muy interesante la información adicional por cada resultado, que nos cuenta si la página a la que hace referencia tiene feed (RSS y ATOM), audio o vídeo, y que además incluye una pequeña imagen como vista previa.

Y el cuadrito donde salen las sugerencias para refinar la búsqueda está bastante bien: sugiere nuevas cadenas de búsqueda y da la posibilidad de delimitar el idioma de los resultados.

Saber más:

• Quaero ahora es Exalead: el motor europeo de búsquedas
• Exalead – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Categoría Exalead en OjoBuscador
• Exalead

Tags Technorati: exalead, buscadores, internet, recuperacion de informacion.