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

With names like Wonder Wheel  and Bing xRank, it’s easy to see how someone can get caught up in the marketing fanfare of these recent technology announcements.

Fortunately, for our customers, these capabilities (and more) are already available to them.

For example, Miiget  is a technology that we’ve had since 2008 and is equivalent to Wonder Wheel in concept.

 www.tweepz.com was built using Exalead technology as a small evening project by an exalead consultant and is similar to xRank. 

But to be fair, Microsoft had to do something and Google had to respond (or preempt?). Yet, the battle isn’t just between Microsoft and Google, but between these two and other web businesses as well.

These new offerings raise the user experience bar for every business that depends upon web traffic. As a provider to these other businesses, we’re keenly aware of that. We have been from our beginning. That’s why customers such as Yakaz,  Hometrader, 118218, and Skyblog use our technology. To improve user experience and user traffic and, in some cases, dramatically so.

Exalead believes in the concept of the long tail. That is, not everyone is satisfied with services provided by Google and Microsoft. In fact we find many users rely on multiple search sites, each for a different purpose. It’s a best-of-breed idea. This makes sense to us, since the time taken to go to a specific site is negligible compared to the length of the conversation with the site. So why not go to the best?

At least that’s how we see it. So in support of our customers, Exalead will continue to lead search technology performance and innovation. Current work in the area of semantics for increased recall, precision and insight will enable our customers to be a step ahead of their competition and provide better information with less cost and effort.

For the past two years, the promise of cloud computing has brought an intense interest in technologies that support large-scale, distributed computing models.

This excitement? Definitely warranted.

BusinessWeek technology writer Stephen Baker covered parallel computing technology Hadoop in December of 2007 in his story “The Two Flavors of Google”. Baker wrote “As more businesses and researchers shift complex data operations to clusters of computers known as clouds, the software that orchestrates that teamwork becomes increasingly vital.”

Hadoop and similar technologies are an important first phase of a computing evolution.

At Exalead, we developed our own computing framework for our web search engine (found today at Exalead.com/search). We call our parallel computing framework DSort. Exalead’s DSort technology, like Hadoop, distributes a computation over a large number of machines.

This scalability is appreciated by a number of clients. For example, France’s blogging platform, Skyblog, which ranks 16th on comScore’s list of most popular web sites in the world, manages 500 million blog entries and handles more than 20 million search requests daily.

The real excitement for Exalead, however, is the idea that we can combine this scalable architecture (in our case DSort) with a level of intelligence and information access functionality that most people haven’t seen before.

This is a major step towards the next big phase of computing.

As analysts from The 451 recently wrote, Exalead appears to be at a crossover point between search and BI. “The challenge with this idea is of course that for the past 30 years or so relational databases have been where the ‘important stuff’ has been stored and the multi-billion BI market grew on top of that as a way to access it.
Database administrators rule(d) the roost as far as information management goes. Meanwhile enterprise search got relegated to a side room where it was all about finding documents and getting pages and pages of results returned to you.

What..Exalead and a few other companies are moving towards is a convergence of the two; call it database offloading, unified information access; unified information intelligence or something similar.”

This means companies are creating mission critical business applications – apps that were impossible a few years ago — on our solution. These applications can scale to extraordinary levels at a fraction of the cost – and often times can accomplish more than traditional IT technologies.

Web-based Architecture Moves Into the Enterprise

One example: GEFCO, a €3.5 billion company which ranks among Europe’s leading transport and logistic firms, adopted Exalead CloudView for use in their new application: “Track and Trace.” The application offers powerful search functionality and up-to-the-minute information from an extremely large data set.

“Before we installed Exalead CloudView it could take a day to get the results of such a CPU-intensive query, by which time the information was out of date,” said Guillaume Rabier, Manager of Studies and Projects at GEFCO. “Now we get these answers almost instantly.”

“With Exalead we are using database off-loading to intelligently rationalize the use of our resource systems. By maintaining a separate index, fewer of the users’ queries run against the database itself. This in turn reduces the load on the database servers which generates results faster and produces greater IT efficiency.”

Hadoop is worth all of the excitement.

We think the direction that companies like Exalead are taking will be worth even more.

At Exalead, we do… or at least we try.

Enjoy !

To thank our sales team and ace engineers for their stellar performance in 2007, Exalead decided to send the crew to Marrakesh for some well-deserved R and R.

On the agenda: camel rides, go-carts, archery…and tech seminars! Because the quest for better search never ends…

So year 2007 is at an end. Yes, already!

After a year of much hard work, many innovations and some extreme challenges, the whole Exalead team wishes you all Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.

We would like to thank you for your loyalty throughout 2007, especially as your comments and ideas have changed the shape our search engine and helped us grow as a company.

We start 2008 with a larger and thoroughly rested team, looking forward to the challenges the New Year brings. We expect many surprises but will continue with the responsible growth you have come to expect.

We wish you all a good holiday season… and most importantly of all, stay connected.
Click here to view your greeting card !

This little froggy was strolling around Madeleine place Friday afternoon for the filming of a Canadian television program.

After a little searching, we have found our frog at Brocoboutique.

Carole&co

Do you remember our post on March 27
about Florian, one of our R&D Engineers, and his cast of fellow antique car
lovers? They were plotting to brave the Moroccan desert in their vintage rides
for a good cause, traveling 1500+ miles (2500 kilometers) in
15 days to bring school supplies to children in 14 Moroccan cities.

Well, they returned victorious!

Carole&Co

Please drop by the search engine rating page on the Webguild site, and rate our engine from 1 to 5 in 5 categories: Content, Authority, Navigation, Design and Accessibility. Your feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks,

The Marketing Team

Logos for Special Events Year-Round

Since the end of last year, Exalead has been dishing up customized logos in celebration of holidays and special events (all carefully selected and not picked with a dice roll by our Art Director, as rumor may hold).

Talk a walk down memory lane in viewing our archive of special event logos.

As always, we welcome your feedback!