Exalead: Making Headway in the US
October 25, 2008
Exalead, based in Paris, has been increasing its footprint in the US. The company has expanded its US operation and now it is making headlines in information technology publications. The company has updated its enterprise search system CloudView. Peter Sayer’s “Exalead Updates Enterprise Search to Explore Data Cloud” here provides a good summary of the system’s new features. For me, the most important comment in the Network World article was this comment:
Our approach is very different from Google’s in that we’re interested in conversational search,” he [the president of Exalead] said. That ‘conversation’ takes the form of a series of interactions in which Exalead invites searchers to refine their request by clicking on related terms or links that will restrict the search to certain kinds of site (such as blogs or forums), document format (PDF, Word) or language.”
Exalead’s engineering, however, is the company “secret sauce.” My research revealed that Exalead uses many of the techniques first pioneered by AltaVista.com, Google, and Amazon. As a result, Exalead delivers performance on content and query processing comparable to Google’s. The difference is that the Exalead platform has been engineered to mesh with existing enterprise applications. Google’s approach, on the other hand, requires a dedicated “appliance”. Microsoft takes another approach, requiring customers to adopt dozens of Microsoft servers to build a search enabled application.
On a recent trip to Europe, I learned that Exalead is working to make it easy for a licensee to process content from an organization’s servers as well as certain Internet content. Exalead is an interesting company, and I want to dig into its technical innovations. If I unearth some useful information, I will post the highlights. In the meantime, you can get a feel for the company’s engineering from its Web search and retrieval system. The company has indexed eight to nine billion Web pages. You can find the service here.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
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