Exalead, the 'French Google', is acquired for €135 million

Exalead, the search engine that (no kidding) underlies Friendster and has been behind French government attempts to build a platform to rival Google (yes), has been acquired by Dassault Systèmes, a leader in 3D software for big company processes for about €135 million ($161.5m).

Exalead’s, which has a platform to apply advanced semantic processing to Web-scale data, include the World Bank among its clients. It was owned by a holding company, Qualis.

Exalead was also key member of Quaero, a technology consortium with a five-year budget of €199 million, funded by the French government to develop multimedia search tools. Where is Quaero now? Well it’s a little like the Airbus project but just inside France.

Lots of cooks creating an, admittedly, passable broth, producing products like software that converts speech into text, turns electronic books into audio books and can translate German speech into English in realtime.