Exalead’s High Performance Platform: CloudView
October 5, 2008
It’s no secret. When I profiled Exalead in one of the first three editions of Enterprise Search Report that I wrote, I likened the company’s plumbing to Google’s. The DNA of AltaVista.com influenced Google and Exalead. For most 20 somethings, AltaVista.com was one of a long line of pre-Google flops. That, like prognostications about Web 3.0, is not exactly on target.
The AltaVista.com search system was a demonstration of several interesting technologies developed by Digital Equipment Corporation’s engineers over many years. First, there was the multi core processor that ran hotter than the blood of a snorting bull in Pamplona. Second, there was the nifty manipulation of memory. In fact, that memory manipulation allowed Oracle performance in the system I played with to zip right along in the mid 1990s as I recall. And, the DEC engineers were able to index the Internet with its latency and flawed HTML so that a query was processed and a results list displayed quickly on my dial up modem in 1996. I even have a copy of AltaVista desk top search, one of the first of these scaled down search systems intended to make files in hierarchical systems findable. On my bookshelf is a copy of Eric and Deborah Ray’s AltaVista Search Revolution. Louis Monier wrote the forward. He used to work at Google, and, what few people know, is that Mr. Monier lured the founder of Exalead to work on the AltaVista.com project. Like I said, the DNA of AltaVista influenced Google and Exalead. In 1997, some AltaVista engineers were not happy campers after DEC was acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett Packard acquired Compaq. In the fury of the HP’s efforts to become really big, tiny AltaVista.com was an orphan, and an unwanted annoyance clamoring for hardware, money, engineering, and a business model.
François Bourdoncle–unlike Louis Monier, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Simon Tong, among others–did not join Google. In year 2000, he set up Exalead to build a next-generation information access and content processing system. What I find interesting is that just the trajectory of Google in Web search was affected by the AltaVista.com “gravity,” Exalead’s trajectory in content processing was also touched by the AltaVista.com experiment.
A result list from Exalead’s Web search system. Try it here.
When M. Bourdoncle founded Exalead, he wanted to resolve some of AltaVista’s known weaknesses. For example, the heat issues associated with the DEC Alpha chips was one problem. Another was rapid scaling, using commodity hardware, not hand crafted components which take months to obtain.
Exalead now has, according to the company’s Web site, more than 170 licensees. Earlier this week (October 1, 2008), Exalead CloudView, a new version of the company’s platform and new software features.
Paula Hane, Information Today, provided this run down of the new Exalead features:
Unlimited scalability and high performance
Business-level tuning and management of the search experience
Streamlined administration UI
Full traceability within the product
WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows
Advanced configuration management system (with built-in version control)
Improvements in the relevancy model
Provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for third-party implementations
You can read her “Exalead Offers a Cloud(y) View of Information Access here. The article provides substantive, useful information. For example, Ms. Hane reports:
One large [Exalead] customer in the U.K. can’t say enough good things about the choice of Exalead—its search solution was up and running in just 3 months. “After performing an extensive three-month technical evaluation of the major enterprise search software vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to fulfill our demanding requirements,” says Peter Brooks-Johnson, product director of Rightmove, a fast-growing U.K. real estate Web site. “Not only does Exalead require minimal hardware to work effectively, but Exalead has a strong, accessible support team and a culture that takes pride in its customer implementations.”
(Note: A happy quack to Ms. Hane, whom I am quoting shamelessly in this Web log post.)
Phil Muncaster’s “Exalead Claims Enterprise Search Boost” here does a good job of explaining what’s coming from this Paris-based information access company. For me the most significant point in the write up was this passage:
The new line features a streamlined user interface, improved relevancy and the ability to extend business intelligence applications to textual search…
In my investigation of search company technology, I learned that Exalead’s ability to scale is comparable to Google’s. As Mr. Muncaster noted, the forthcoming version of the Exalead software–called CloudView–will put Exalead squarely in the business intelligence sector of the content processing market.
You can get more information about Exalead here. A fact sheet is also available here. Exalead’s Web index is available at www.exalead.com.
I have to wrangle a trip to Paris and learn more about Exalead. I hear the food is okay in Paris. The French have a strong tradition in math as well. I remember such trois étoiles innovators as Descartes, Mersenne, Poincaré, and Possson, and others. In my opinion, Microsoft should have acquired Exalead, not Fast Search & Transfer. Exalead is a next generation system; it scales; and it is easily “snapped in” to enterprise environments, including those dependent on SharePoint. I think Exalead is a company I want to watch more closely.
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
