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Same Story

Search Engine for Personal Stories

» Pioneering search engine and collaborative portal
SAME STORY brings together personal stories from blogs, forums, and personal web pages across the Internet. The goal of the engine is to help users rapidly locate others with exactly “the same story”.

The Same Story challenge: They needed an infrastructure-level search platform upon which they could build the entire SAME STORY service. And, as a Web "pure player", they had very demanding requirements in terms of performance, quality and speed of execution:
- High Scalability: answers delivered in less than 3 seconds
- Indexation of Hybrid and Multilingual Data
- Quality and Innovation in Semantic Search
- Rapid deployment by a small team
The response

• Deployment in record time: "We knew this was a highly complex challenge from the outset. However, with the EXALEAD CloudView solution, we were able to launch a successful first version of our service in only a few months." Virginie Barbieri, Co-founder of SAME STORY

• A New Genre of Search Engine: service that effectively and automatically aggregates, organizes and structures a wide range of UGC distributed across the Web.

• A Next-Generation Interface: Users can search via a single search text box, and refine results by a range of filters (thematic, profile, sentiment and source) as well as sorting results by contextual categories (dates, number of times a story has been accessed, votes, etc.) or using a tag cloud of keywords related to their query to refine their search.

• An Agile Architecture: The platform’s architecture is perfectly tailored to meet the stringent quality of service demands of SAME STORY, including full compliance with security constraints, high availability, and maximum scalability.

The bottom line, from Sonia Lecommandoux,
Co-founder of SAME STORY:

"SAME STORY moved from 5,000 unique visitors a month in December 2009 to 150,000 in May 2010. More than 95% of this traffic is organic, driven mainly from the general search engines people have become accustomed to using as a first stop resource for answers to difficult personal matters (health, relationships, career, etc.)"

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Friendster

Online social network

» Leading Global Social Networking Site
With more than 110 million members worldwide, Friendster, a leading global online social network, turned to EXALEAD to make it even easier for members to locate their friends or acquaintances on the Friendster network.

To build on its momentum in the social networking space, Friendster sought to improve its ability to distribute and aggregate the valuable profile information generated by millions of members worldwide.

As a result, Friendster sought a new search technology that could deliver:
- Unified access to rich and voluminous content
- Simple and innovative interfaces, with intuitive navigation
- Discovery and distribution tools that are the main drivers for user satisfaction today
The Response:

• Rich Search Refinement: Search results can be filtered (by age, gender, and profile type), ability to aggregate user profile information from anywhere in Friendster's global network, etc.

• Sub-Second Response Times: Members get near real-time access to the valuable information in the user profiles

• Minimal Hardware: Unlike other search platforms, EXALEAD delivers breakthrough performance and sophisticated functionality with minimal hardware

• Positioned for Growth: As Friendster management looks to the future, they will count on EXALEAD to continue to meet the high information access expectations of its 110 million members

The bottom line, from Prakash Dodeja, Director of Engineering at Friendster:

"The response times on search have definitely improved with EXALEAD. It's important our members get near real-time access to the valuable information in our user profiles. We are pleased to say that EXALEAD's enhancements have helped us achieve this goal."

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Rightmove

Real estate portal

» The leading site for real estate classifieds in the United Kingdom
400 search requests per second, at 1/6 the cost of the legacy tool! The perfect blend of lower admin costs and a richer user experience, for a reduced TCO and optimum agility.

With 29 million monthly visits, Rightmove.co.uk is the most comprehensive and most popular real estate classifieds site in the United Kingdom.

A site whose core business depends on the performance of its technology platform and the quality of its search results must be completely reliable and offer advanced search options: EXALEAD CloudView satisfied all of these criteria.

Key Facts: Rightmove + EXALEAD CloudView
- 2 million classified ads and 29 million unique visits/month
- Robust features like Search Radius, which allows you to search within a specified distance of a given location
- A scalable solution that can be modified without affecting the existing database system
- 400 QPS (queries per second) on only 3 servers
- Cost per query reduced from 0.06 pence to 0.01 pence
- Limited financial investment
The bottom line, from Peter Brooks-Johnson, Director of Product Marketing at Rightmove:

"Thanks to EXALEAD, our cost per search request has dropped dramatically, from 0.06 pence to 0.01 pence, and we can now scale our site as needed at a considerably reduced cost."

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118 218 Le Numéro

Telephone directory service provider

» The number one phone directory service in France
A hybrid Web/database search engine for the directory assistance leader, and traffic quadrupled in one year!

Following up on the popularity of its phone directory service, 118 218 Le Numéro launched the first version of its online directory in March 2006, and chose EXALEAD for its final version in September.

The 118 218 challenge: Solidify its position on the Web and differentiate itself from the competition by offering superior search and an optimized customer experience.

Deployed in a matter of weeks, the service developed around EXALEAD technology met the expectations of 118 218, thanks to:
- A simplified search field and a search refinement panel for more precise and thorough search using various criteria
- Unparalleled hybrid search that draws not only from the directory database, but also from company websites
- An interface that offers an unmatched user experience: single search page, option to send results by SMS, reverse search, local search, maps...
The result: traffic doubled only 5 months after launching the beta version!

The bottom line, from Bruno Massiet du Biest, CEO of 118 218 Le Numéro:

"The EXALEAD solution went well beyond our expectations. Thanks to the EXALEAD and 118 218 Le Numéro teams, the solution was implemented in record time. In only 60 days, we had service available 24/7 with around 3 million monthly visitors!"

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Lagardère Active

Production and aggregation of multimedia content

» The largest media group in France
Tapping into the abundance of information produced by the largest French media group.

A leader in offline media, Lagardère Active quickly recognized the need to secure a prominent position on the Internet and has made its strategic objectives regarding the Web quite clear: strengthen the leading position of its flagship publications and increase online revenues from 1% in 2008 to 5 to 10% in 2009.

The Lagardère Active challenge: Increase the profitability of its content, solidify its leading position on the Web and stand out among the competition by offering a unique user experience.

The EXALEAD Solution:
- Assisted navigation tools (which add depth to the group's portals and significantly improve access to online content)
- A Web crawler that is robust and flexible
- Cutting edge HTML extractors
- Rich, open-source configuration and development tools
- Real-time indexing
Offering a taste of tomorrow's Web by emphasizing user experience and increasing opportunities for advertisers: Dékio, a mashup portal that is all décor, all the time.

Dékio offers members of the decorating community a place of their own, where they can feel at home and find the products that are right for them. With every click, the user's profile is refined, to guarantee high-quality search results that are completely customized.

About Dékio:

• More than 2,000 décor-themed sites registered

• Innovative navigation features combining text and images

• Suggested filters to allow for refined searches: by theme / color / style / price / material / designer

• Ability to choose the kinds of sites users want to search and even to delete specific sources of results

The bottom line:

With more than 15 published sites, including some of the most well known in the market, a new, 100% decorating, vertical search service launched in a matter of weeks (Dékio), a successful iPhone app, positive results in page views, unique visits, a CPM that is already impressive, and a strong emphasis on advertising, the Lagardère Active group has made the most of EXALEAD technology and doesn't plan to stop there.

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Yell

Professional telephone directory

» The leading online directory in the UK
A major first in the online directories sector: beyond the traditional directory, a "Yellow Pages" portal dynamically enriched with extensive information.

With a database of 2.3 million professionals, businesses and merchants, Yell.com is one of the leading online directories in the United Kingdom.

The Yell challenge: Enrich its online offering in order to increase visitor loyalty, and extend the length of each site visit.

EXALEAD met this challenge by building a custom vertical web search engine in just a few weeks.

The solution: Extraordinary mash-ups entirely adapted for the needs of Yell, combining:
- Consumer info and advice extracted from the Internet
- Related websites
- Wikipedia™ information
- Image search
- Video search
The bottom line: Yell is now the most comprehensive and richest online business directory in the United Kingdom. This success extends as well to technical performance: the system flawlessly handles nearly 180 requests per second, 24/7.

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Yakaz

Classified ads search engine

» Search among more than 3 million classified ads
Yakaz: the ideal combination of quality service and controlled costs

When entering the online classifieds market, the founders of Yakaz decided to break with tradition from the start: They didn't want to create a classified ads service that was just like all the rest. Rather, they wanted to offer a next-generation service that intelligently searched the classified ads that were already published on the Web.

What Yakaz needed:
- A differentiating service
- An effective indexing tool
- Controlled TCO
- Rapid international coverage
- Immediate ROI guaranteed
The EXALEAD Solution:
- Provides unified search for more than 10 million classified ads in 15 languages published on 10,000 websites
- Relevant search results with unique search refinement technologies and fuzzy matching
- Very short deployment and fast, simple installation and maintenance
- Optimal performance using minimal resources
- Easier and richer user experience thanks to unified search
Bottom line, from Mathurin Ducastelle, Co-Founder of Yakaz: "With a team of only 10 people, we offer Internet users in 10 countries the most comprehensive classified ad service on the market. We have become a pivotal and profitable company in only a few months. Our partnership with EXALEAD is the key to our success."

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EXALEAD.com

Public Web search engine

» Making Web search simple, fun and effective

Online since 2001, EXALEAD's Web search engine has now indexed 16 billion web pages, 2 billion images, and 4 million videos.

Among the features of this application:

- Auto-completion of the request as it is entered, suggesting terms from the index associated with the request that you are entering

- Display of thumbnails to instantly qualify results and, especially, a unique search refinement panel, which allows you, with a few clicks, to narrow or expand your search based on dynamically extracted categories

- Ability to customize the search refinement panel to meet your unique needs. By clicking the "tools" icon at the upper right of the navigation pane, you can choose the search refinement categories you want to see

- Related searches displayed above the search field, so you can rapidly select queries related to your original search

- Option to refine searches by language and country, presented in the form of pie charts for results

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EXALEAD Wikipedia

Encycopedia search

» Adding a whole new dimension to the world's most well-known online encyclopedia
Nearly 1 million Wikipedia articles indexed and delivered. One of the best Wikipedia search tools in the world.

The thumbnails are generated from images in the encyclopedia. The tag cloud lets you narrow your search according to Wikipedia's XML categories, related terms taken automatically from the results, and other named entities (people, places, organizations, etc.).

You can search within all language versions of Wikipedia simultaneously, but you can also restrict your search to a specific geographic location (language).

All results include information on:
- the Wikipedia categories of the article
- the famous people mentioned in the article
- the organizations and places related to the article
One click on these terms extends the search to include the selected term, thus enabling the user to navigate freely throughout the encyclopedia.

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Exalabs

Research laboratory

» EXALEAD's online research lab for exploring the innovations of our R&D teams
Exalabs gathers the latest proposals and inspirations from our R&D labs onto a platform that can be accessed by everyone.

In this space users can try out new experiments in enterprise and Web search, produced from our engineers' imaginations and devised in collaboration with clients and partners.

Some of our projects:
- Miiget, a celebrity search engine
- Wikifier, a module for automatically enhancing web page content with Wikipedia information
- Voxalead, searches for information inside videos, rather than simply metadata like titles
- Chromatik, advanced image search based on color
- Tweepz, a search engine for finding people who are using Twitter
- Sourcier, a service designed to facilitate access to public data on subterranean water quality, created in collaboration with the BRGM (France's Bureau of Geological and Mining Research)
Would you like to know more? Visit labs.exalead.com.

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