Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

Why is choosing a company name with care so important?

Because choosing a company name with care means going beyond simple marketing concerns…

To age well, a name should speak to a company’s unique DNA and not today’s hot trend.

To stand out within the frenzied mass of today’s Internet, a name must also be both distinct and instantly recognizable. Confusion is the enemy of a strong brand.

We strove to ensure Exalead would reflect us uniquely and accurately: both what we were yesterday, and what we will be tomorrow.

Thank you, Steve Arnold, for a helpful reminder to us all of the importance of choosing a name with care…

Read Steve Arnold’s blog entry on ArnoldIT

Well, as some of you have guessed what has been cooked up and others were taken into our confidence… here it is!  The new version of our Exalead search engine, on-line today.

While concerned with promoting innovation in the web search engine sector, Exalead’s teams are proud to present you with this new version that is only the beginning of a new adventure.

Mostly based on a graphic overhaul of the engine, this version certainly provides new features and functions.  Some of these further respond to several suggestions that you have communicated to us via the Feedback space.

Among the new features and functions:

•    Auto-completion of the query, suggesting associated terms from the index that help you formulate your search

•    Associated searches, beneath the search bar, that allows you to re-launch a query in line with the preceding one,

•    Refinement by « languages » and by « country », presented in the form of a pie chart,

•    Display of thousands of images on the same search page and the repositioning of the refinement window, for an optimized presentation of results,

•    Customization tools for searches more adapted to your needs.  By clicking on the “tools” icon on the top right of the window, you can choose search refinement categories that you want to appear.

You will also notice that the sponsored links are displayed in a less intrusive manner than before, for a more comfortable read.

Rendez-vous from today forward on exalead.com/search to test it yourself!
And above all, don’t forget to send us your suggestions for improvement and discussion with other users on feedback.exalead.com!

An Italian Exalead customer, CARIFE won the Innovation Award for the Web 2.0 and collaboration category.

The SMAU, a prominent Italian ICT Expo, particularly renowned for its attention to Innovation rewards the most forward-looking IT projects each year.

This year, Carife (Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara) caught the professional’s attention with its unified search service based on Exalead CloudView.

Exalead features allowed Calife employees to access relevant content more easily, share their knowledge and collaborate better: A single access point to more than 50 different information sources (mainly Lotus Notes), forward-looking navigation tools, an easy and fast implementation, and ability to respect security measures.

Congratulations to our Italian Team!

For more information, please consult the Carife client case

The Spanish capital hosted some members of new elite technologies during Red Innova, the first forum on innovation and technology for Spanish  and Portuguese speaking markets.

This forum gathers Latin American Internet leaders and other Internet leaders interested in sharing their experiences, ideas and upcoming projects.

François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, made the trip and share roundtable on “Cloud computing & Information Access” with Tim Barker from SalesForce.com and Juan Tonda from Microsoft.

Here are some pictures for the curious!

One of the world’s largest social networks uses Exalead CloudView to power innovative search across millions of images, videos and blogs, capitalizing on a stunning wealth of user-generated content. Skyrock General Manager Franck Cheneau explains…

Watch the video!

For information management, databases offer precise, controlled access to data.
But, they do not offer the easy-to-use search capabilities that most knowledge workers manipulate daily on sites such as Google. Access to information contained in databases is more difficult, and more restricted. One solution to this information bottleneck is to let search engines support the brunt of the work, by offloading information from the database into alternative infrastructures, such as that provided by search engine technology.
Many business applications such as search, report generation and data analysis might be performed more efficiently on the replicated data without involving the native database technology, e.g. transactions. These offloaded databases, retaining some of their structure, can be recombined, mashed up, creating one-off, possibly disposable, databases, while the primary data is safe in the original database.

Exalead has taken the lead in organizing a scientific workshop to examine the limits and potentialities of use information retrieval and search engine technology for information management (IM) applications.

Come see the results at “Using Search Engine Technology for Information Management (USETIM 2009)” Aug 24, 2009 Lyon, France.
This workshop is being held during the 35th International conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB09)

The call for papers for USETIM 2009 is open until May 10, 2009 just here!
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=5101&copyownerid=3906

We have a search engine for videos and images, and there is always room for another to add more variety to each.

When it comes to the Web, Twitter has a lot coming its way and hence we have Tweepz: a search engine to find people on Twitter based on Exalead’s core technologies.

Simply enter the name, bio of a person you are looking for and Tweepz brings out the closest possible matches.

Demonstrating the capability of Exalead’s powerful technology, Tweepz, created by Exalead’s Netherlands Team (Jochem Prins), was conceived in only a couple of days. Congratulation Jochem

Tweepz is currently indexing just over 2.5 million Twitter users (follow @tweepz to be added to the database) and aims to make finding people who interest you an easier task.

Tweepz not only lets you search by geography, biography or name, but also hopes to index the content of Twitter users’ nominated URLs in the future, thus offering a larger scope and capacity to return meaningful search results.

But Tweepz takes it further than that!

You can also filter your results. You can narrow your results by number of followers, the language they speak or extracted entities (key words which show up in their bios) all of these divided into percentile ranges.

RSS feeds for specific queries are available, as is the simple ability to tweet the results you are seeing.

Test Tweepz.com and give us your feedback!

We are glad to announce that Mike Hobson has joined Exalead as Sales Director for the UK and Ireland.

Prior to coming on board, Mike was the UK Sales Director at Autonomy. Mike is responsible for overall business in the region with a special focus on partnerships. He has over 18 years experience in sales and sales leadership roles working for leading software companies including Autonomy, Verity, Information Builders and Interleaf.

We wish him good luck in his new role!

On April 6th, CIO, LeMondeInformatique.fr and IT NEWS INFO’s ceremony for Enterprise and Business Trophies for Information 2009 was held.

We are very proud to announce that GEFCO has won the CIO-online.com trophy: “Grand Prize and Innovation Trophy” thanks to its new vehicle track & trace service built on Exalead CloudView’s platform.

The Innovation Trophy awards efficient and effective audacity; the Grand Prize awards a particularly relevant and complete IT strategy that services the organization that installed it. With 2 of the most prestigious prizes, GEFCO is the big winner of the night.

This critical application for GEFCO’s business, conceived with the ST Groupe, constitutes one of the first major SBA applications (Search Based Applications) from Exalead. This prize bestowed by Chief Information Officers from the biggest companies, awarded both GEFCO’s choice of innovation and Exalead’s vision that has promoted the use of Index type technologies to construct business applications for several years, like operational reporting, with a guaranteed return on investment.

More information about this award >>

More information about the GEFCO case study >>

And a bonus, images from the event!

Our friends from the well known site Pandia have pushed the button very far with their April 1st posting.

In case you have doubts, we have not had private meetings with Serge Brin (we would be very honored) and Exalead continues to develop worldwide in an independent manner, increasing signatures, innovating daily with our clients. Thanks to the readers of this blog for supporting us with so much energy.

Greetings to Per and Suzanne who have supported us for several years, our revenge would be sweet.

On behalf of Exalead and its frog-eating poets.

PS: Between us, we have heard that some of our competitors were using this info to counter us at prospects and customers. The masks fall