Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

BAAGZ version 1.1 has been released recently.

On the agenda : bug fixes (”error 500″ problems are solved) and a bunch of new funny features.

- Massive upload for images

Stop uploading pictures from your computer one by one. You can now select several files at once and save time. It is a invaluable tool to create image galleries.

- Gallery

You can now add one (or more) image galleries in your baagz. Customize a gallery the way you want by changing picture size, borders for each photo or display order.

New borders have also been added. Do not hesitate to play with them to create nice effects in your baagz.

Tip : try and click several times on a border icon and see what happens

- Wall

To give your visitors the ability comment on your creations, you can add a fully customizable wall of comments anywhere in your baag.

Have fun with those new features and do not hesitate to leave a message to show us the baag you’re especially proud of !

The Company Plantronics launched a contest to find a new and more appropriate term to define people that work beyond the office.

The jury of 7 bloggers had an intense debate to chose 10 “finalists” from more than 500 submissions. Final terms were submitted to public vote for two weeks.

After more than 2200 votes cast, the word that now replaces ‘telecommuter’ is ‘cloudworker’. According to the winning submission, “a cloudworker is somebody who uses on-demand technology and collaboration tools, such as unified communications, to work anywhere and anytime, and uses the resulting freedom to enable a my-size-fits-me career path and lifestyle”.

And coincidentally, Exalead’s CloudView product range fits in perfectly with this concept!

Source

Discover Exalead CloudView

Heard something notable at the Butler Group Enterprise Search Strategy Briefing in late November.

A rep from Scotland’s National Health Service talked through a case study of their use of FAST and offered up some … interesting … metrics.

The customer indicated that they were anticipating growing their system from 11 million documents to 18 million documents … but that this growth would require 22 servers.  Considering that NHS employes a staff of roughly 150,000, and assuming all these staff run 10 searches a day for a maximum of … say … 16 hours per day, this is roughly 1 query per second.

This means FAST, for this implementation, needs 22 servers to run 1 query per second across 18 million docs. Without going into all the technical detail, this isn’t entirely surprising given FAST’s dependence on a slew of different technologies (which adds to the complexity of their deployment) and their need to distribute to more and more servers as the amount of content that needs to be located, searched and indexed grows (which presents a challenge for companies whose data pools are increasing …  i.e. all of them).

Just for the sake of comparison, Exalead customers get 20 queries per second across 20 million docs with only 1 server — less cumbersome, more efficient and greener than the 22 servers described by NHS.

Especially in this time of economic downturn and budget belt-tightening, it’s even more crucial that businesses get the most IT bang for their buck.   Make sure you make the right choice for your information access so you can utilize your important data and preserve your corporate resources.

Stephen E. Arnold, a famous analyst in the online search engine field came to our French offices last February to interview François Bourdoncle.

A few months later, he came back to our Madeleine headquarters and granted us a video interview.

He tells us about his vision of the enterprise search market - the new study he wrote for The Gilbane Group ‘Beyond Search : What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work’ has just been released. He also shares his opinion about two ExaLabs projects he tested. The first one is Voxalead (available at http://voxalead.labs.exalead.com) which is a demonstration of the Speech-To-Text technology born from the collaboration between Exalead and LIMSI (Informatics Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineer Sciences).

The second demo is an occasion for you to discover an unrealeased search project called Restminer. Focused on New York Restaurants, Restminer gives the user structured information extracted from the unstructured web -dedicated press, blog posts, restaurant reviews, directories data…- with relevant tips such as sentiments analysis coming from different sources.

Here is the whole interview.

Exalead thanks Stephen Arnold for making himself available and being so professional !

Stephen Arnold’s Website : http://arnoldit.com/
Stephen Arnold’s Weblog : http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/

Are you trying to find an embedded search solution that meets your users’ needs and your specific application requirements?

Have you tried to embed search into your application, but found it difficult and expensive to customize and integrate?

Have you already embedded a solution only to find that it lacks the performance and functionality your customers are demanding?

Would you like to learn about how you can cost-effectively give your customers access to search that has been architected for ISVs, offers value-added features, and scales?

If so, we’d like to invite you to join our webinar, “12 Leading Insights on Embedded Search for ISVs.” Learn about:

• Major Market Trends for Embedded Search
• Key Challenges Facing ISVs with Embedded Search
• 5 Most Important Embedded Search Requirements
• What Works and What Doesn’t
• Overview of Exalead CloudView OEM Edition
Moderator
• Eric Rogge, Senior Director of Marketing, Exalead

Featured Speakers
• Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of OEM, Exalead
• Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

Date/Time
• Friday, December 5, 2008 at 11am PST

Registration:
To register for the webinar, please click here.

To download the Exalead whitepaper “The ISV Challenge: Satisfying the Demand for Better Search,”

View a brief video interview about the webinar with Miles Kehoe.

Sue Feldman at IDC recently released a report that found that the search and discovery market grew to $1.8 billion in 2007. That’s a 28% growth rate last year…in a sluggish and slowing economy…and so far research has shown that the market has continued this trend into 2008. Also considering the software industry grew at between 4%-6%, that is a pretty amazing statistic.

What is even cooler and a lot more impressive is that Exalead grew at over 300% last year. This means that we’re not only growing much faster than the market but we’re also eating up our competitor’s market share, because, as Sue points out, Exalead provides simplified access to complex and varied content repositories.

The reason for both our company’s and the search market’s growth is simple: businesses realize that increasing visibility into new types of data sets – structured and unstructured, from all different sources inside and outside of the company — empowers better decision making.

Of course, as Sue points out, what underlies this all is the age-old business need to understand the customer. In modern times, the key to understanding the customer and customer needs lies in corporate data — documents, e-mails, CRM systems, etc. Customers communicate with their vendors/partners through multiple channels not just what shows up on the order form when there’s a purchase. Great information access systems use all of these repositories to give a 360 degree view of the customer relationship.

Exalead has been allowing businesses to unlock the door to customer satisfaction for years, and, just like the market we inhabit, we have no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

Innovation is a leading priority for Exalead. That is why the company often gives its support to external initiatives like this project set up by students from U.T.C. that developed Gephi, in collaboration with WebAtlas association. Gephi is an open source software under GPL3 license that enables 3D networks graphics manipulation, exploration and visualization.

What is this graphic about?
It represents a semantic analysis of the relationship between terms used on the Web to speak about Intellectual Property Rights in the French language.  Each node symbolizes a word or a group of words and each edge connects two expressions when these are co-cited in more than 120 000 web pages.  Each color refers to a “semantic cluster”, which is a bunch of words than concern the same topic.

How can I get this type of graphic?
After an extraction of related terms found on Exalead databases and a manual filtering phase, the project team receives a GDF file with ordered data.  Then, the exploitation of this file by Gephi combined with a specific algorithm leads to the data “spatialization”. Then color filters highlight different semantic clusters.

Here is one of the first demonstrations of Gephi with real-time spatialization of several keyword clusters. In this video, the blue color refers to a “genetics” cluster, orange nodes relate to terms about biology and laboratories, green ones concern words speaking about controversy in the domain of GMOs and purple nodes relate to innovation and research development in biotechnology.

Gephi - Dynamic demo from gephi on Vimeo Congratulations to the project team for this great web mapping tool!
Do not hesitate to visit the Gephi website to obtain more information and test this software.
If you are interested in this subject, you should know that the team continues to recruit.