Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I for one would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that are taking place about their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation, negative sentiment and bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more use cases of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related web sites or people.  The experiment is built upon our web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.

One area where we’ve seen a lot of search-based business application traction lately is in e-discovery.

It makes total sense. e-discovery isn’t a business process where one can just use Google or Bing. It has a specific purpose, namely to favorably resolve litigation. And there are unique data challenges associated with e-discovery — exact enumeration, managing information privilege and establishing chains of events just for starters.

At the same time, the data management systems accessed during e-discovery often continue to support enterprise operations…meaning that data is continuously being added. This makes establishing a consistent and preserved evidentiary data set a challenge.

In short, e-discovery necessitates a way of searching data that is unique and special to that activity. Of course, the ability to customize the search parameters and relevancy can be crucial, given the different types of information that different organizations need to provide for different reasons. TJMaxx’s PCI compliance requirements are different from UCLA Medical Center’s HIPAA requirements, which are in turn different from the e-discovery requirements of any company unfortunate enough to be embroiled in a civil or criminal lawsuit. And let’s not forget that all of this needs to be done without breaking the bank.

Scalability? Cost-effectiveness? Accuracy? Data preservation?

Answer: search-based applications (SBAs)

But don’t take our word for it. Listen to our partners and customers.

Today we announced that  GWAVA has integrated Exalead CloudView into their Retain E-Mail Archiving Platform. Why? It was more scalable and customizable at a lower cost than their existing solution.

Messaging Architects is another example. They recognized the changes that new types of data (like e-mails) brought to the business of records management and needed a solution that could quickly search and index terabytes of content, no matter the language or source. And what solution did they choose? You guessed it – Exalead.

Just two examples of how SBAs can evolve to meet the changing needs of all enterprises.

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.

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!

BAAGZ version 1.1 has been released recently.

On the agenda : bug fixes (”error 500″ problems are solved) and a bunch of new funny features.

- Massive upload for images

Stop uploading pictures from your computer one by one. You can now select several files at once and save time. It is a invaluable tool to create image galleries.

- Gallery

You can now add one (or more) image galleries in your baagz. Customize a gallery the way you want by changing picture size, borders for each photo or display order.

New borders have also been added. Do not hesitate to play with them to create nice effects in your baagz.

Tip : try and click several times on a border icon and see what happens

- Wall

To give your visitors the ability comment on your creations, you can add a fully customizable wall of comments anywhere in your baag.

Have fun with those new features and do not hesitate to leave a message to show us the baag you’re especially proud of !

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 !

The Scottish Government selected Exalead technology to open up online access to 25 years worth of official documents on its portal, www.scotland.gov.uk. Exalead was selected not just for its scalability and data-format versatility, but also for the very practical search assistance it provides to site visitors. The Scottish Government has also replaced their legacy enterprise search system that was running on their internal content with Exalead.

Managing an annual budget of more than £30 billion in 2007-2008, the Scottish Government is responsible for most of the issues of day-to-day concern to the people of Scotland, including health, education, justice, rural affairs, and transport. To aid the public in accessing information pivotal to these day-to-day concerns, the Government needed a search tool that was as pragmatic as its mission.

Exalead’s patented search navigation technology fulfills this need, helping users get beyond what they type in the search box to helping them find what they are truly looking for. It does this by guiding visitors through the search process, enabling them to refine their searches according to pre-defined metadata like site section (About, Topics, News, Publications, Consultations), or using automatically-extracted information like document type, creation date, subject matter, document category, related terms, and more. For, as the Scottish saying goes, “The tree doesn’t always fall at the first stroke.”

Officially launched earlier this month at GITEX (Gulf Information Technology Exhibition) in Dubai, the TAYAIT.com engine aims to become the search engine of choice in the Arabic-speaking world.

To help TAYAIT achieve its goal, the Exalead-powered platform offers access to 50 million Arabic web pages (soon to be 100 million), and the site incorporates Exalead’s acclaimed Wikipedia and image search tools. In addition, TAYAIT takes advantage of Exalead’s flexible API infrastructure in integrating Encyclopedia Britannica’s® market leading plug-in for Arabic language text analysis.

A veritable tour de force realized in record time—less than three months…Together with the Dutch search engine www.ilse.nl, TAYAIT aptly demonstrates the capability of Exalead’s technology to respond to the most complex Internet search challenges, in any language.

In France, people have a daily habit of dialing 118 218 to get the number of their favorite Thai restaurant, to find out what’s playing at the local cinema, or to scout out a new dentist.

Now this telephone information service has launched a beta website at www.118218.fr that offers visitors a new, free way to access to its immense database.

Powered by Exalead’s search technology, this new hybrid web/database directory offers rich visuals and practical search refinement tools to help users get the right information—fast.

Exalead has reached an agreement with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) that will allow Exalead to offer its public search engine users access to INIST’s massive database of English, French, Spanish and Italian-language scientific articles.

Exa-searchers will soon be able to explore this rich resource using Exalead’s practical search refinement tools, like dynamically generated lists of related terms and concepts.