To thank our sales team and ace engineers for their stellar performance in 2007, Exalead decided to send the crew to
On the agenda: camel rides, go-carts, archery…and tech seminars! Because the quest for better search never ends…
Did you know enterprise search is fast becoming the de facto way to access corporate information, just as web search engines have become the gateways to information on the Internet? We invite both enterprise search neophytes and pros to visit our corporate blog, which covers:
And of course, don’t forget, we welcome your comments and questions on that blog as well as on this one!
The European Commission has approved funding for QUAERO, an advanced research and development program concerned with the automatic processing of digital multimedia content. The program involves a consortium of 23 partners (including Exalead) and is headed by the Thomson group. Read the press release on Europa, the portal site of the European Union.
On February 28, Exalead, in partnership with KMWorld and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), hosted a webinar in which Exalead’s co-founder
Exalead is participating in the 14th annual Documation expo, March 12 and 13 at CNIT Paris,
As part of his series “Search Wizards Speak,” search guru Stephen Arnold recently interviewed Exalead founder
Almost every late-generation website has embraced the same recent interface (UI) trends, sporting slick AJAX- and DHTML-generated interfaces, and most offer their users community-driven features like user ratings and content-creation tools. Some, like Prosper, Youtube, Facebook, eBay and Wikipedia, have or will become bellwether sites as they discover novel ways to empower consumers.
Some may even participate in taking the web to the next plateau by breaking through the walls separating one site from another. For, as amazing as the web has been at linking people together to accomplish great (or at least impressive) things, it has mostly failed at creating communication links between websites, leaving the web ocean filled with myriad islands.
It is a logical progression. First portals and search engines revolutionized the web by their grand success in linking documents; then social networks altered the face of the Net by linking people. Now, new technologies promise a third revolution by forging new links between websites.
These technologies, as represented by projects like OpenId, the Data Portability Project, and Microformats, are devoted to standardizing and facilitating information exchange so data can be easily ported from site to site. Think, for example, at the personal level, of the convenience of creating or updating your profile across all your personal networking sites using a single form. This kind of data portability, plus a new, shared philosophy of openness among web players, is beginning to create these website linkages, leading to an almost perfect fluidity of data on the web.
Mashups are of course one of the first manifestations of this fluidity. Using the web as a platform, mashups leverage available APIs (application programming interfaces) to combine data from multiple sources to create new services on existing websites. Consider, for example, a site that combines mapping data from one site with yellow pages information from another to create a rich directory not available on either source site.
This trend toward open exchange will only accelerate. As a first consequence, computers will become true “digital assistants,” providing a web experience that will become more and more personalized for everyone (with everyone simultaneously becoming more and more tuned in to privacy concerns).
Following this line of thought, we can seek the next evolution in the next kind of link being built. It is in fact already being built around us. It is an even deeper link between people arising from the convergence of personal communication and Internet access devices. The mobile phone will soon serve as the primary way to be online, with any time/anywhere connectivity thanks to the persistence of wifi/wimax connections, allowing for a ubiquitous yet even more personalized and more useful experience.
The next step will be the link between web applications and real life objects, with more and more objects being connected to the Internet (think of cars with GPS systems and “smart” household appliances connected to the Internet for remote management). Simultaneously, connected devices will play an increasingly active role in data exchanges. Think, for example, of your mobile phone not just providing GPS data to a web application in order to direct you to a local restaurant, but also (knowing your music download history and the community forums to which you subscribe) communicating your love of music as part of your profile, with the result being you are automatically steered to a restaurant with a live pianist at lunch.
And following on the heels of links between web applications and real life objects will be links between the objects themselves. What happens when your mobile phone, your TV and your smart car get together (with each other and their peers) to talk about you? Who said scary?
Join us Thursday, February 28, 2007, 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern Time for the KMWorld Webinar:
Exalead co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, Director of Knowledge Solutions for The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), will discuss ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. Also on the agenda, hot trends in information access, including the growth of hybrid vertical search applications in business.
Register now for this FREE webinar:
http://www.kmworld.com/webinars/register.aspx?eventid=279&src=kmb
Now that we’ve updated you about new platforms added to the index (Part 2), and told you how you can add your own videos, let’s take a closer look at the structure of the search results.
Enter for example ‘Daft Punk’ in the video search engine:
http://www.exalead.com/video/results?q=daft+punk
When you click on a video’s thumbnail image, you can preview the video without leaving the search results page. Handy, huh?
You can also refine your results by confining them to a particular source, a specific video duration, or even a specific topical category and descriptive keyword.
Happy video hunting!
Exalead participated in Search Engine Strategies January 15 and 16 at the Grand Hôtel Intercontinental in Paris.
The program included presentations by the leading search providers in the French marketplace, plus an educational session designed to give practical answers to day-to-day questions about search engine marketing.
Jean Marc Lazard, who heads up strategic projects at Exalead, took the podium to present Exalead and raise awareness of the diversity and versatility of search on the web today.
Here is a PDF of his presentation, “Exalead: For all the ways you use the web”
Enjoy!
