Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

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.

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.