Did You Mean Katia? – Part 2

This is a sequel to my post “Did You Mean Katia?” which I published five months ago. I seriously hope that I do not have to do a Part 3 further down the road. A search for “CATIA” on the Exalead World Wide Web Search Engine still has no link to 3ds.com on the first page of search results. Not even on subsequent pages. I stopped at page 5. And Exalead still asks me if I meant “Katia”?

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I was in the audience at DSCC 2010 in Orlando last week when Bernard Charles said that his search engine could index every word of text in a DWG file. He also said that now he had the technology to be able to pull all the 16 billion or so web pages of the entire internet into a company’s intranet and index it. This is all nice to hear. But the capability to do something does not imply that you can do it properly.

I have to assume that the search technology used in Exalead’s world wide search engine is the same that is used in CloudView, their enterprise search engine product. And in my opinion, that search technology is plain and simple horrible. The first search result for “CATIA” points to some page at jobvertise.com talking about jobs in IT/Telecom. The word “CATIA” does not even figure anywhere on that page. The first search result for “AutoCAD” takes me to the web site of someone offering AutoCAD courses in the UK, and not autodesk.com. In fact, autodesk.com does not figure anywhere on the first five pages of search results. I just didn’t look further. I mean, WTF?! Is this a search engine or some kind of a freaking joke?

This is shameful, to put it mildly. I tried searching for “Exalead” and it returned exalead.com as the first result. Phew! What a relief.