1) We've been admirers (and users) of what Francois and his team at Exalead have been up to for the past few years. The company has been around for about seven years (with a focus on enterprise search) and in late 2004, they launched a general purpose web engine. For power searchers, Exalead offers a bunch of advanced search syntax including a proximity operator.
Lately, we've been noticing that for some (NOT all) pages, the recrawl and refresh rates (how often the crawler returns and how often the database is updated with the new/changed/ material) has increased in frequency. We often spot pages via the Exalead cache that have been recrawled/refreshed within a day or less.
To find the date of the last crawl/refresh, simply click the thumbnail image on a search results page and a cached version of the page will appear. The date is found on the top left of the cached page. Since Exalead is based in France, their crawl date is 6 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S.
2) Since the Fall of 2005, Exalead has allowed users to personalize their Exalead home page with direct links to specific pages. Each entry includes a link and a thumbnail of the page. You can register and transport your favorites to any computer. Otherwise, they are kept on the specific computer using a cookie.
We've noticed a new feature on Exalead results pages that makes creating shortcuts and adding them to your personalized Exalead homepage very easy.
At the bottom of each result on a results page, look for the link labeled "Add to Shortcuts." Click it, and that page will be added to your favorites on the Exalead homepage. You can also add shortcuts by clicking the link on the home page and entering the URL. You can move shortcuts by simply dragging them to a new location in the shortcut area of the page.
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Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
