Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

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.

Exalead had a great month in January – we can sense we’re making some waves in the industry as we ramp up in the US. We’ll say more about our momentum in the upcoming weeks, but in addition to increased interest in our information access platform, a few well-respected industry experts have said a nice thing or two about us in the past few weeks:

- Leading search consultant Miles Kehoe wrote on his blog “Exalead CEO Paul Doscher…has certainly increased his company’s visibility in the US market in the last 6 months, and they seem to be gaining strength in both the OEM and direct sales channels.”

- Expert search analysts at the Gilbane Group said “We have seen companies like Exalead… gain on former leaders.”

- “Beyond Search” blogger and well known search consultant Steve Arnold wrote on us a few times in January talking about our strategy and momentum. On January 8 he wrote “I am on the record as a person who finds the Exalead engineering among the top tier in the search and content processing world.” He also conducted a QA with me in early January and threw in his 2 cents on our OEM product launch where he concluded “The company continues to make headway in the US market.”

- Exalead execs also spent some time talking to eWeek, FierceContent and others on our strategy moving forward.

But it wasn’t a perfect month. We had scheduled a webinar with Leslie Owens from Forrester in January, but we had a technical hiccup that forced us to reschedule.

We have rescheduled the webinar for this Friday, February 6 at 11 a.m. PT.

You can register here.

Over the past several months we’ve seen record interest in our information access platform CloudView.

We’ve also noticed an interesting trend. Increasingly, we’ve been approached by enterprises who are hoping to work with us (that’s not the interesting part) … and who are moving away from legacy enterprise search solutions such as Microsoft FAST and Autonomy.

Many FAST customers and prospects don’t like being forced to use Microsoft as their server infrastructure (Linux anyone?) and Autonomy users, especially OEM partners, are frustrated by Autonomy’s pricing structure. As Gartner reported :

“Autonomy’s opaque pricing model can irritate prospective customers, as they cannot predict what price the vendor will offer. Also, they often find its proposed price the highest of any they receive.”

And don’t get me started on our technical advantages.

With this sweeping shift away from older enterprise search products to newer, faster, more scalable information access platforms offered by vendors such as Exalead, we invited leading Forrester analyst Leslie Owens to come speak about how companies can migrate from the old to the new.

On Wednesday, January 21 Leslie will join us for a webinar entitled “Search Platform Migration: Mitigating Risk with Innovation” where she will discuss among other things:

- How enterprise search can expose a “messy, heterogeneous state of enterprise content”

- The driving needs of enterprise search users

- Key tips for evaluating your current solution and picking a new search solution.

Please join us and register for our webinar on January 21!

If you miss it, that’s ok –we’ll keep an audio version online and you can listen to it whenever you get the chance.

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.

Exalead Image Search has just received a major update: a new user interface and 2 billion images.

The brand new Exalead Image Search stands out for its freshness (you’ll find images from the news), and its user interface that is both simple and efficient.

With Exalead Image Search:

• save images on your hard drive in a single click
• organize your Favorite Images your way
• leverage your wide screen, the number of search results adapts to the biggest resolutions
• refine your search in a click, to search only faces for instance

Exalead Image Search offers an extremely clear view of your search results: only thumbnails and sizes are displayed. Detailed information appears when your mouse hovers a thumbnail.

The right column (a.k.a Zapette) is gone, giving even more space to search results. Refinement features are displayed upon focus of the search input field.

Try Exalead Image Search and drop your feedback.

We have been waiting for it for some months: the latest creation from Exalead’s R&D department is finally going to be released from its beta format.

After a real facelift, BAAGZ, the new community site, allows you to discover and share images, videos and articles on your favorite subjects. All of this, in a completely personalized fashion.

Discover

Passionate about sports, fashion or another topic, BAAGZ is the place where you will find the most interesting and up-to-date information, organized around thematic communities.

Share

Publish your ideas on rich pages, illustrate your topics with images and videos. Allow your friends to enjoy it and the rest of the community.

Participate

Comment on the news, meet others passionate about the same subject, vote for the best content, and express yourself in forums.

Stay connected

Select your favorite communities and receive information in real time on your profile page.

Create a community

BAAGZ gathers more than 10 thematic communities. You didn’t find what you were looking for? Suggest it and invite other members to participate.

Easy to integrate into your existing site and built on robust technologies, the BAAGZ platform allows you to construct your own communities and display your existing content.

Come and test the new application, available as a white label for web portals and and please do not hesitate to give us your feedback !

Exalead one:desktop software uses Exalead search technology to find almost any type of file on your PC – mail, documents, charts, presentations, media files… With its exalead.com look, this software deeply integrates within your customized exalead.com interface.

Now, you can search the Web, your PC, images, Wikipedia and videos from one single entry point FOR FREE! The same way you search on exalead.com, you can refine your search by date, related terms, file type, source, language, file size, sender, recipient…

New with one:desktop 4.6 :* Intuitive navigation of search results with the Exalead web search engine interface
* Rich preview of virtually any kind of document
* A “Search and act” system: users can “act” on a retrieved document directly from the results page
* A Right Column that permits users to manage the results page: choose the categories and the order of display
Do not hesitate to try this exalead one:desktop free edition and read this Quick User Guide and tell us about your user experience !The Press Release is available here.

exalead one:desktop also exists in a professional edition to search on your company’s Intranet and more. Click here for more information

Round up your friends, your family, your coworkers, the mailman, your dog Spot…The finish line is in view and Exalead is ahead of the pack, but the race is far from over.

Vote, vote vote for Exalead as your favorite alternative search engine!

QUAERO officially launched March 17. For those who missed our earlier post, Quaero is an advanced R&D program focused on the analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content for professionals and consumers. This 5-year, collaborative initiative includes 24 industry and university partners, with a total budget of approximately 200 million euros (99 million in public financing from France matched by an equal contribution from project participants).

Centered around technologies for the automated treatment of text, speech, music, images and video, Quaero seeks to develop new ways of addressing information access challenges in the face of the digital revolution. The effort revolves around five axes including the digitization and enrichment of content for libraries and publishers; personalized, multi-device distribution of video; better targeting for advertising; and multimedia search for the Web via the Exalead search engine.

Quaero represents a “unique opportunity” for small French companies to advance technologies in these fields even though they do not have access to the extensive R&D resources of giants like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, states François Bourdoncle, co-founder of Exalead.

 

Each month on his blog AltSearchEngines.com, Charles Knight (whom we’ve spoken about before) selects one candidate as his Alternative Search Engine of the Month. Now, he’s handing the ballot box over to YOU to select the Search Engine of The Year.

Just go to The Search Race and sign up for a free Search Race account. You can cast a ballot for as many search engines as like, but you can only vote once for your favorite engine (like…ahem, EXALEAD). He also invites balloteers to submit an engine if he’s overlooked any in his top 100. A great way to celebrate the rich (but often hidden) diversity of search on the Internet today.

So, don’t just sit there, rev up your mouse and VOTE!