EXALEAD for Online Knowledgebases

The Challenge for Online Knowledgebases

You have become a trusted source of information and knowledge for your members or subscribers. But for them to realize the value of your offering, they need to be able to easily locate, understand and use the resources you provide. Traditional approaches to this information access and retrieval challenge have either failed to meet this essential need, or have left you saddled with unsatisfactory cost or administrative burdens.

The EXALEAD Solution

EXALEAD offers a better, easier way to meet this search challenge. It enables you to:

• Add significant value to your existing resources by helping your users better find, explore, understand and leverage the valuable content you provide
• Extend the range of resources you are able to offer
• Reduce your IT cost while positioning you to scale to any size user or data volume

In short, EXALEAD can help you transform your website into a true 24/7 self-service knowledgebase.

Our goal was to provide a '24/7 selfservice' tool for accessing ARF knowledge and other related and relevant information any time of day, anywhere, providing a true 'treasure trove' of knowledge.

Steve Rappaport, Director, Knowledge Solutions, ARF

Increase Customer Satisfaction, Add Value to Existing Assets

EXALEAD's patented "Search by Serendipity"™ produces faceted navigation of results using automatically extracted classification data and categories. With a single click on one of these dynamic categories, users can expand, narrow or redefine their searches. This capability, plus user-friendly technologies like "type ahead" query suggestions, spelling correction and fuzzy matching via synonyms and approximate and phonetic spelling, are making 'no-results' or abandoned searches a thing of the past, and encouraging information discovery, reuse and sharing.

Extend Your Range of Resources

CloudView enables you to add depth and context to your existing knowledgebase resources by enabling you to extend connectivity to any internal or external resource, regardless of data volume or format (structured like database content or unstructured like multimedia files and text documents). You can carry this contextualization a step further by easily "mashing-up" internal content with content automatically extracted from the Web (news feeds, images, videos, blogs, etc.).

Increase Sales Revenue

In addition to boosting new and renewal memberships or subscriptions, extensive cross-referencing capabilities and white-box relevancy controls help you promote your (or your partners') products or services.

Reduce Administrative Burdens, Improve Content Accessibility

EXALEAD improves existing classification systems by first fully exposing existing taxonomies so staff can instantly see and improve the results of their work, while the engine's advanced text analytics enrich these existing schemas with automatically extracted categorization and classification information drawn directly from the body of each document. The result is a unified, transparent and easily refined organizational system for your content. With this improved organization comes increased accessibility, reducing information request demands to staff.

Better Understand Customer Needs

EXALEAD's online reporting tools include a Statistics module that enables you to stay abreast of customer usage and preferences, with measurement of key statistics like most frequently consulted documents and top search requests. The online Configuration tools make it easy to adapt your Solution's performance based on this feedback.

The ability to automatically return related topics and categories for every search query - without any customization - was one of the key points of differentiation for EXALEAD.

Bruno Marmol, Head of IT, Scientific and Technical Information Management, INRIA

Reduce IT Costs While Boosting Performance

If you are currently providing service using a database, switching primary access to this content from direct database queries to the CloudView index enables search that is as as rich yet 100s of times faster and much less expensive than traditional relational database technologies. It can also help you dramatically boost performance and scalability, with lightning fast 'read' access designed to provide real-time access to petabytes of data by thousands of simultaneous users, and can help you reduce hardware, software and license costs via Database Offloading.

If you are currently providing access via a search engine, you can count on CloudView for a marked increase in performance, and reduced costs, thanks to CloudView's unique engineering. Only Cloudview was engineered from the ground up for both the enterprise and the Web, powering an 16 billion page public Web search engine and serving more than 100 million unique monthly visitors through its public and customer installations.

For further information on performance, see also Search-Based Applications, or download our whitepaper, The Hidden Costs of Scaling Search.

Extend Knowledgebase Benefits to Staff

Most knowledge organizations also leverage EXALEAD for internal enterprise search, with employees deriving as much value from unified, contextualized access across repositories as much as customers.

Customer Success Story: Advertising Research Foundation

Formidable Constraints, A Simple Solution...

When the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) decided out to create a new online knowledgebase, they set some very strict project constraints:

• Taxonomy
  ARF would not build a taxonomy (resource issues, time, maintenance)
• Entity Extraction
  Key entities would need to be available out of the box, and new entity extraction rules should not require a lot of effort
• Document Preparation
  The new solution would need to work with existing documents "as is" - only minor clerical tasks could be performed.

The Results
They found the robust out-of-the-box solution they were seeking in CloudView. The new ARF Power Search was operational in a matter of a few days, and on launch received "a phenomenal response from our members and the folks who work here at ARF" (Steve Rappaport Director, Knowledge Solutions, ARF). Download the ARF Case Study, or view the KMWorld Webinar in which Mr. Rappaport discusses ARF's experience in implementing this online knowledgebase.