The Challenge for Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites face a number of tough challenges:

• Meeting escalating performance demands
• Managing massive volumes of heterogeneous content
• Building member loyalty and attracting new members
• Keeping up with Web innovations
• Controlling IT costs

Available under both hosted and license arrangements, Exalead CloudView™ provides a multi-faceted search and information access solution that addresses each of these key challenges.

Break through Performance Barriers

CloudView is far faster and infinitely more scalable than either traditional relational database technologies or legacy search solutions, providing sub-second query processing and real-time updates for petabytes of data and thousands of simultaneous users. (See performance benchmarks in the CloudView SOA & Performance page.)

Gain Control over Diverse, High Volume Content

Unified Access to ALL Content

Unlike database-driven search, CloudView provides rich exploration of 'unstructured' content like text, chat, email, webpages and multimedia files. And unlike legacy search engines, CloudView effectively processes database content, merging both structured and unstructured content into a single, dynamically classified resource.

Real-Time Updates

Perhaps more importantly, CloudView can give your members real-time or near-real time access to continually evolving user profiles and content—even with millions of pages in flux. There is no need to make your members wait for scheduled spidering or batch database updates to access fresh content.

Build Membership and Revenue

Provide More Successful Search

The Pivotal Role of Search

"Search is a key growth driver for our company. More connections and higher network activity drive growth on Friendster. That's why search is very important to us. It's absolutely critical."

– Prakash Dodeja, Director of Engineering, Friendster
Friendster Case Study

For your business to succeed, your users must be able to quickly and successfully locate friends and make new acquaintances. CloudView greatly enhances this process by:

• Dynamically identifying relationships
• Automatically categorizing profiles and interests
• Radically cutting "zero-result" searches
• Providing advanced user search aids

These user aids include spell checking, type-ahead query completion, suggested and related query tools, phonetic and approximate spelling matches, synonym matching and other "fuzzy" matching technologies. And for each individual query, users are presented with a dynamic menu of categorized results for easy one-click search refinement.

Offer Rich Media Innovations

Exalead innovations like Constellation (visualization of results) and Miiget (relationship detection and mapping) offer engaging new ways to visualize and explore relationships. Technologies like Voxalead (search inside of videos) and advanced image search (exalead.com, Chromatik) further offer engaging new ways to explore and share multimedia content. Together with more successful search, these kind of innovations can help you achieve critical business goals like:

• Increasing page views (and advertising revenue!)
• Extending site visits
• Increasing member loyalty
• Attracting new members

Test drive Exalead innovations at Exalabs, the online research lab Exalead's R&D teams. To explore Exalead innovations deployed on our clients' sites, visit our Demos page.

Significantly Cut IT Costs

While CloudView helps you build revenue, it can simultaneously reduce your hardware, software and license costs. Sharing the same high-performance engineering and distributed architecture as Exalead's public Web search engine (which processes 2 billion queries a month), CloudView delivers millisecond responsiveness against any volume of data using exceptionally lean resources, supporting indexing of 100 million documents and processing 20 queries per second on a single low-cost server. The system is also specially designed to be configured, deployed and maintained using minimal staff resources. Download CloudView Platform Highlights or our whitepaper, The Hidden Costs of Scaling Search, for further cost and performance information.

Gain New Agility

CloudView's service-oriented architecture (SOA), support for standard Web technologies, and distributed architecture can further bring new agility to your business, helping you more easily adapt to change:

To learn more about how Web-derived search technologies are bringing radical new agility to the enterprise, download our whitepaper, Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies.