Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

In September, Exalead will be present at no less than 3 European events. Whether you are in Berlin, London or Paris, come and meet our team!

• SuMa-eV Forum, Berlin, September 10th

The German “Association for the Promotion of Search Engine Technology and Free Access to Knowledge” holds its 6th meeting on the topic  “Information and Knowledge – The Driving Force of the 21st Century?” on September 10th. Exalead will be participating, and François Bourdoncle, Exalead co-founder, will lead a workshop on innovative and alternative new search engine technologies.
Learn More (in German)

• Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2009, London, September 16th and 17th

Exalead is both an exhibitor and sponsor of this summit held by Gartner, one of the most well-known analyst companies in Information Technologies. Do not miss the presentation by Jean-François Gaucheron from AFP (Agence France Presse), an Exalead customer, on Thursday 17th.
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• Conference Décisionnel CIO – LeMonde Informatique, Paris,
  September 22nd

This free meeting is for CIOs and Project Managers only. It will be held on the morning of September 22nd at Hôtel Prince de Galles.
Learn More | Subscribe (in French)
Discover more events in which Exalead will be participating

The O’Reilly Team’s Velocity ‘09 conference was held June 22-24 in San Jose, California.

Several ‘Web celebrities’ spoke about Cloud Computing, a theme picked up by some lesser-known gurus as well.

That is the case of Jeremie, an R&D Engineer at Exalead, who was chosen as a speaker for an Ignite session.

What is an Ignite session? It’s a session in which each speaker has 5 minutes to talk about a technical Web-related issue, with 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds -  before an audience composed of fellow “geeks,” of course.

Jeremie thus spoke for 5 minutes on a trendy topic in data storage solutions: “key value stores”. This data storage system appears to be more efficient than traditional relational database management systems, but it is also more simplistic. According to Jeremie’s point of view, one should be vigilant regarding the immaturity of some of these solutions. Moreover, they make data cross-referencing more complicated, and they cannot be used for every type of application. These simple tools have been created for very specific needs (e.g., there are key value stores in Exalead’s low index layers).

Here is Jeremie’s session at Ignite Velocity 09:

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!

OK, so you won’t win a Wii by just saying hello, but you will have a chance to enter a random drawing for one by meeting with us at Enterprise Search Summit 2009 on May 12-13 in New York.
Stop by our booth number 28 to book an exclusive preview to our new Exalead CloudView offering and get a complimentary search needs assessment with Spencer Shearer, Exalead’s Senior Director of Technical Services. The assessment will include a detailed evaluation of your company’s enterprise search and information access needs.

Launched in September 2008, Cloudview™ is our new unified information access platform built on Exalead search technology. IDC calls our technology disruptive “because the company has moved aggressively from Web search to enterprise search, and now to information access…Exalead is one of only a handful of companies that have created new and better hybrid architecture to handle data as well as content.”

We’ll have a crew from Exalead on hand to show and tell you more about CloudView as well as how Exalead is helping create a new generation of smart, search-based applications that put data easily at your fingertips.

If you’re in New York, but not attending the conference, you can still meet with us at our private suite at the Hilton New York. Let us know in advance and we can reserve a time for you.

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

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!

Since Exalead started as a web search company in 2000, we’ve gained insights into the kind of search system that users need to locate specific information across a complex set of media and data types on the web. Many online publishers are finding that standard built-in search solutions don’t fit the bill when success with readers and users depends in large part on the ease with which they can navigate through content within the website and beyond.

For instance, with the growth of video and audio as outlets for content on the web, advanced search is necessary to cull this data and make it readily available and integrated with more structured data types. In addition, users are joining the information creation process with social reviews and rankings, and online publishers need search that effectively tracks and analyzes these interactions.

Our customers have also found that highly scalable search architecture is important as the web is becoming increasingly interconnected in interesting ways. From the perspective of online publishers, there’s a great opportunity for “mash-ups” between data from the local site itself and internal databases, and useful contextual data from the web and outside applications.

On Thursday March 5th at 8:00am PT, Morgan Zimmermann, Exalead VP of Business Development, will continue our discussion about the business opportunities that advanced search presents to online publishers looking to do more with their content. Morgan will discuss how online publishers can:

- Regain complete control over their content and transform it into a long-term, organic, profitable business
- Achieve strategic independence from content aggregators and advertisers
- Secure brand positioning across a spectrum of innovative user experiences
- Use ‘mash up’ and Hybrid search to improve profitability

You can register for the webinar entitled “Online Publishers: Is Content the Only Key to Success?” here.

We recently had an interesting conversation with Rob Wiesenberg, CEO of Contegra Systems, which designs customized websites and user interfaces for online publishers. Exalead works with Contegra to integrate contextual, scalable search solutions into their web products. Rob is an industry guru when it comes to helping online publishers sell their content. He founded Contegra more than 20 years ago and over the past decade has helped hundreds of publishers design their sites in a way that maximizes profit.

In this video hosted on our website, we chatted with Rob about some of the key challenges online publishers face today, including:

- The need for tagging to improve search and highlight useful metadata

- The need to access information across many different data sources and file types

- Most importantly, the need for a search solution that is customizable to an intuitive user interface that promotes the publisher’s content

Rob says the best online publishers are looking for the kind of search solution that helps readers find information quickly and efficiently and keeps them coming back, turning content into revenue.

To learn more about Exalead’s embedded website search solutions and our other e-business offerings, please visit our website.

Also, on Thursday March 5^th at 8:00am PT, Morgan Zimmermann, Vice President, Business Development at Exalead, will join us for a webinar entitled “Online Publishers: Is Content the Only Key to Success?”

You can register for the webinar here.