Our Customers

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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Akerys improves its service for home owners and tenants
thanks to Exalead CloudView

A leader in rental investments and commercialization of new housing, Akerys works in four complementary industries of business: commercialization of new housing - insurance brokerage, credit and financial products, property development, estate services. In order to unify client vision for the whole company, Akerys developped three projects with Exalead's technology, including the two projects described below.

First project: ASI Extranet (Akerys Real Estate Service), customer self service

Akerys' Requirements:

- Have online consultation and invoicing tool to move transactions from paper to online
- Reduce the cost of mailings
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Install inter-application software that would make the decision-making process easier for users
- Reduce cost of maintenance and support

Benefits of Exalead CloudView Solution:

- Produced in four months
- Two times less expensive
- Time to Market faster than the original quote of 10-12 months
- Possible to develop new applications with CloudView technology

Second project: Real Estate Labs (Labo Immo) decision-making tool.

Labo Immo is a small part of a larger project called Real Estate Laboratory. This project aims to increase awareness about the brand. The present and long-term goal was to elevate Labo Immo as the benchmark for producing accurate statistics in this sector.

Requirements:

- The more than 18,000 employees at Akerys needed a more precise and updated vision of their business market
- With a better understanding of their market, employees can better define prices and are more equipped to make better decisions
- Streamline access to key data and make it easier for users to intuitively locate important internal and external data about the market
- Internally develop a business intelligence tool that could optimize apartment sales

Benefits of Exalead CloudView Solution:

- Extraction of structured and qualified Web data to analyze real estate market trends with only qualitative data and not the whole real estate listing
- Archival of data to better track changes and detect trends in the market
- Bringing together of multiple sources : Users can access quantitative data, photo library, and data management all in one place

The Results : In a market as volatile and unpredictable as real estate, Exalead has given AKERYS teams and potential property investors a business intelligence tool that helps them not only optimize the sale or rental of properties at instant t, but also allows them to reduce financial risk by t+1.

A Leading Global Social Networking Site Connects People with
Exalead CloudView™

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.

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: 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."

To learn more about this project, download the case study

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."

Read the Case Study

A Search Engine at the Core of the Semantic Web

By structuring and organizing online content, semantics tools are consistently making it easier to use simple search to locate relevant information on the Internet. Now SAME STORY, a new search engine that brings together self-published stories from all over the Web, is making it easier for Internet users to share personal experiences and give each other advice. By aggregating personal stories and organizing them by keywords and themes, SAME STORY helps users locate stories and experiences that similar to their own. Users only need to use the simple search bar to find relevant stories. This innovative and user-friendly search architecture relies on the semantic search platform of Exalead CloudView.

SAME STORY's Challenges:

- Create a unique service in a continually expanding market
- Aggregate exhaustive content from all over the Web to a single site
- Support the indexation of very large volumes of data
- Offer users intuitive and simple navigation
- Provide real-time and relevant search results
- Index hybrid and multilingual content
- Develop a service flexible enough to be expanded across international markets

Exalead CloudView Solution:

- A technology with out-of-box capabilities that met SAME STORY's scalability and response time requirements
- A clean and easy Web navigation experience
- Flexible architecture (SOA using Java API)
- A user-friendly and intuitive tool
- Multilingual capabilities
- Rapid deployment administered by a small team
- Simple visualization of search results and refined browsing

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

"SAME STORY has moved from 5,000 hits a month in December 2009 to 150,000 unique visitors in May 2010. Organic traffic, which is driven mainly from search engines, stands at an impressive 95 percent. People are turning to mainstream search engines for answers on difficult personal matters regarding health or relationships, and those search results are driving them to us. And with such an innovative partner like Exalead, we won't stop there..."

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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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.

Read the Press Release