Exalead Tightens NewspaperArchive Tie Up

March 26, 2010

A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a Marketwire story about Exalead’s deal with NewspaperArchive.com. Exalead is one of the most interesting search applications and content processing companies we monitor. The story I read was “NewspaperArchive.com Scales With Exalead”.

The story reported:

NewspaperArchive.com is the largest historical newspaper database online. It contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1753 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy for people to quickly explore historical content. NewspaperArchive.com had bumped up against limitations of having nearly 100 million records. After the switch to Exalead in December 2009, NewspaperArchive.com has been able to scale again, increasing the number of records by 20%; while at same time reducing the amount of hardware by 75%.

The performance angle is important based on our research. There are very few companies with the engineering and architecture to deal with the types of data flows found in many organizations today. One of the founders of Exalead worked on the AltaVista.com search system. I have identified a number of Exalead innovations that moved beyond the Digital Equipment approach to search. One of the most important is scaling and a design that permits enterprise applications to break free of their lock step methods of making data available to users. Exalead can give today’s iPod savvy user a way to access business information with the fluidity of downloading a tune from Apple’s system. In the enterprise, this type of functionality is a rare animal in my experience.

Exalead, founded in 2000,

…is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, American Greetings and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. Cloudview collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt.

I want to let you know that the last time I was in Paris I got a preview of Exalead’s forthcoming search application technology. I am not at liberty to let le chat out of the bag, but I will be describing the system when Exalead makes a formal announcement.

You can get more information about Exalead at www.exalead.com. Additional information about NewspaperArchive is available at

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