Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

A quick shout out to Tracey Skinner of  Waterfield Technologies who was kind enough to spend some evening time discussing her thoughts and experiences around Customer Service, and in particular Self Service.  Following discussions with Exalead customers and trudging through countless articles and reports on the topic, it was interesting to get the insights from someone who provides integration services and customer service solutions to clients of all industries and sizes.

First, I wanted to get an insiders perspective on the state of adoption of new software technologies.  “We’re not seeing a lot of companies making expenditures on new suites or replacement technologies versus making what they have better.”  Tracy went on to echo what we’re hearing from Exalead customers:  call centers are filled with archaic legacy systems that don’t talk with each other and their current big challenge is to tie all these systems together in cost efficient ways to improve the effectiveness of their communications with and services for their customers.  Budgets are so tight that companies are being more creative than ever to get existing systems to work better.  “It requires a compelling ROI pitch in order to bring in technologies that require licensing.”

With respect to the state of self-service, Tracy said Waterfield is seeing a dramatic increase in the interest for self-service portals with many clients either discussing, in process, or evaluating solutions. However the implementation of self-service portals and the like is impeded by economics.   Despite this, Tracy is hearing, from her clients, a strong resolve to make advances in 2010.  This is encouraging to hear, but it seems the previously sited data integration challenges could directly impact the quality and effectiveness of a self-service solution.   Tracy admits she is not sure people fully understand the impact of data integration and need to look at fundamentals first before slapping a web UI on-top.  “When IT starts drilling in, they begin understanding other expenditures and tend to bock.”

Given Exalead’s own experiences, a search-based approach can be used to address the customer service data integration challenges while providing a compelling ROI.  With this approach, a search engine indexes content from any source(s) desired:  databases, file servers, content management systems, email servers, the Web, etc.  Whatever the number or type of resources indexed, the result is a single structured data layer that can be directly queried by users, or tapped by other applications using standard Web formats and protocols.  This eliminates costly and complicated integrations on the backend, providing unified access for all Customer Service reps and customers to all the appropriate structured and unstructured data inside and outside the firewall regardless of the source.

Beyond the integration of information, the search-based approach provides other advantages, further improving the success and effectiveness of a self-service solution.  More on that in the future.

Exalead Smart Search for Travel And Leisure solutions

Frommer’s 2009¹ online travel experience survey states that “half of all travelers have struggled with poorly constructed, confusing and inaccurate websites that don’t provide them with sufficient images and information. The survey also showed that consumers were frustrated by technology-related issues such as slow downloads and broken links.”

Obviously, there is a lot of work to do making consumer’s online travel booking experiences better.

At Exalead, we see this as an opportunity for search based applications.

Imagine if, instead of using a cumbersome search form, you could simply type “New York Giants January Home Game” and the search returned game ticket offers, associated promotions and advertising for travel, accommodations, dining and other relevant attractions.

Another example, imagine if in the early stages of planning a scuba diving trip to Mexico, a search allowed you to see the best deals for scuba across many different Mexican resorts. In less than a second, Exalead creates navigational categories for the user to look at additional offers such as hotels that offer scuba certification, hotels that take kids, boat rentals, restaurant deals, spa packages, city guides or resort info.

This would significantly improve the consumer’s experience at the same time add revenue for travel sites.

With Exalead’s Smart Search for Travel and Leisure solution, travel sites can present personalized, relevant ad placement that align with a user’s stated profile as well as their site behavior. This improves conversion revenue, ad click- through revenue and helps differentiate a travel site over its competitors.

How?

• Smart Search uses a user’s stated profile as well as relevant travel preferences through observing their behavior using Exalead’s Smart Search semantic processing and  relevance profiling technology.
• Smart Search processes, profiles and presents relevant promotions, advertisements, supporting information and social network content by interpreting user profiles, user queries and web page views.

At Exalead, we believe activity-centered travel arrangements will be a major step forward in making researching and booking travel online much less frustrating.

For those of you who will be attending the PhocusWright Travel Innovation Summit November 17 in Orlando, please come by and see our demo!

Jean Marc brought you a very delightful post about Chromatik last week with a lot of beautiful images. I will now describe in more detail how it was built. As with the DVD you perhaps watched last night, I am afraid there will be fewer big special effects in this blog than in Jean Marc’s post, but I hope to give you an insightful view of what happened behind the curtain.

Chromatik was an elaborate demo, the result of a long effort on both the back-end and the front-end. It indexes one million images. For all of them, a color signature was built and indexed. Our current intuitive user interface, exploits this index to help you filter and select images by choosing a combination of colors, luminosity or text.

A large number of people tried and liked the Chromatik demo so much that we received several requests to integrate it into the official Exalead search site. And because the demo ran relatively bug free and smoothly, our friends thought it was a piece of cake. Of course, it was a bit more work than perceived. So where are the challenges?

1) The front-end side

A lot of questions are to be answered:

• How will I adapt the GUI of my application to integrate the new features ?
• Are all these new features necessary ?
• What is the feedback we’ve received on the different features ?
• What is the added value of these features ?

The answers to these questions will impact the total amount of space on the GUI we will take for surfacing them.

2) The back-end side

Let’s begin with a little theory:

Theorem of the factor 10 effect:
No matter how good a developer you are, if non-trivial code has been designed and tested with only N elements, it won’t work without modifications when applied to 10 * N elements.

Demonstration: Rather simple: if you don’t believe it, try it yourself…

In this case we wanted a factor 1000, so we knew it would need some adjustments but when you know this theorem, the advantage is that you can anticipate and the experience we have gathered with these situations at Exalead enables us to know most of the bottlenecks.

Example 1: Chromatik needed 300MB RAM which is quite good for 1M images. But now, if you multiply this number by 2000, it gives you 600GB RAM which is quite large even if the final index is distributed over multiple machines.
We therefore decided to reduce the richness of the colors, while maintaining usability, migrate from version 4.6 to version 5.0 of Exalead CloudView and use a more compressed encoding. In the end, it now only costs 9GB.

Example 2: When you want to analyze two billion images, you need to have a robust code, which means that’s able to handle all sort of images even those which do not have a valid RFC. It’s not that easy, when even the most used library in the world for basic image manipulation can crash on some images as we reported.
The result was that this run spotted some bugs in our code that we hadn’t seen before and therefore had to fix.

Example 3: The demo was initially a single machine application. We needed to use the distributed system framework included in the CloudView technology to be able to run the whole process of extracting, crawling, indexing in only a few weeks. This framework really helped us transform the single machine demo to a fully load-balanced and monitored application. This use case is a little different than our standard www.exalead.com chain, so we discovered and tweaked a few points in the code that were cumbersome.

The purpose of this integration was to offer a new service to the users of the exalead.com search engine and improve the robustness of the Chromatik technology. We now better understand the impact of different tweaks on color indexing.

Transforming a demo into a real product is not as easy as it seems. I hope this post helps you understand why a lot of companies only show you demos but never real live applications.

At Exalead, we don’t sell demos to our customers; we sell tested and robust solutions. We make sure we work hard to test and uncover all the issues so our customers’ implementations go smoothly.

Eurosoftware100 has published its 2009 list of the top 100 French software publishers.  Eurosoftware100 is a European ranking system and series of indices for the software industry managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Due to an 80% revenue increase in 2008, Exalead jumped ahead 30 places in the ranking within one year (from 95^th place in 2008 to 64^th place today) — a leap we are very proud of!

It is hard to detect trends in what is happening all around you, but the following major institution clearly shows a world moving from text and fixed images to video.

Press photography is about to undergo fundamental changes in its business model. Up until now, it has been “buy photo content, store content, wait for client, sell photo”. They have seen the signs, or possibly heard Clay Shirky’s message about the death of old business models in the newspaper industry

…there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments…

Press photography is soon to experiment with a new business model: moving from content owner to content producer and distributor, moving from photos to videos.

They plan (I learned this last night from a friend in the photography world) to no longer wait for customers to come buy their photos, but rather to harvest the vast amount of locally produced, real time news images and to use their photojournalistic experience to filter and edit and package to produce their own content: story, video, editing. They plan to sell or give away a packaged widget to (online) news outlets. Activating the widget will send control back to the press photography site, which then streams its story and manages it own advertising revenue from the stream.

What does this shift portend for information retrieval?

Information retrieval began as text based storage, gradually incorporating other formats, including structured textual information from databases.

Then search engines began to index photos and videos. Google added its Image tab to its home page around October 9, 2001, and its Video tab around August 14, 2006. We added our Exalead Video search tab about a year later.

These first video search systems used the same methods as with image search, using the text found around the raw data sources, and the text in file names, and in links pointing to the multimedia file, to serve as index terms.

But as more and more information may only be presented in video form, it will be necessary to index the content of videos, too. We do this in our experimental video search system, VoxaleadNews.

But what I didn’t realize until last night is that systems like Voxalead might not just be some cute add-on to a search engine, but that this might actually be what future search engines are: that information might only come in video, and that things like text and even still images, will become some quaint, outdated media, like engravings are now.

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