2005 News Coverage

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	EBSCO Focuses Search Efforts Around Endeca "We were impressed with Endeca's advanced search, Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities," said John Fitts, vice president and general manager of EBSCO's Information Systems and Services department. "The Endeca platform will help deliver a compelling user experience while providing simple, powerful tools to create and configure new applications. Endeca was the only vendor we looked at that could offer this combination."
	West Marine Expands Search Engine Marketing Tony Gasparich, vice president of direct sales, says the company recently added a site search application from Endeca Technologies Inc. Customers now have more ways to shop the boating supply retailer's online inventory of more than 150,000 products. Improvements include guided navigation which helps customers search more quickly by brand, price, sale items, new items and most popular products.
	Endeca Unveils New Information Access Solutions Each of the new information access solutions combine search and navigation functionality with Content Spotlighting capabilities, providing users and customers with multiple, integrated ways to explore, find, and access content through a single interface. Features of these search capabilities include: spell correction/suggestion, phrase recognition, entity/noun extraction, "snippeting" (keyword in context), and more. Content Spotlighting features--unique to Endeca--give publishers new capabilities to promote contextually relevant and high-value content along side search results lists and to provide dynamically-created topic pages--all based on a user's profile, search terms, and/or browse path.
	Guardian revamps search engine with Endeca Lloyd Shepherd, deputy director, digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers, said: "We wanted to do something that the web search engines wouldn't be able to do - use the information in our content management system to make a browseable search experience. After all, what's the point of having our own search if it doesn't do a better job of searching our content than the big search engines already do?"
	Easier e-procurement "The search engine has been very well received by customers, and it is reflected in business growth. Web sales in our European and Asian business grew 41 percent in the first half of 2005. E-commerce is now in excess of 18.5 percent of the overall Premier Farnell marketing and distribution business." - Rob Knight, group e-commerce director at Premier Farnell.
	The Web Smart 50 The Net is wriggling into the nooks and crannies of businesses across the world. Here, a glimpse at the future.IBM Project: Apply the principles of supply-chain management to people. IBM's goal was to create a database of employee profiles that managers could use to match the right consultant with the right job.Payoff: with 36,000 consultants in its system, Big Blue saved $500 million in its first year alone, cutting the time needed to assign the employee by as much as two weeks.
	Searching at the Office "In an information economy, the way you use information as a weapon determines your success," says Steve Papa, founder and chairman of enterprise search firm Endeca.
	Enemies Unite To Face New Competition: Autonomy To Acquire Verity for $500M "On the second front, Autonomy-Verity faces competition from best-of-breed up-and-comers. Although year-over-year revenue and profit are up for Autonomy and Verity for the latest quarter, our research suggests that focused search companies like Endeca, Inquira, and FAST Search have been making significant gains against Verity and Autonomy based largely on appealing to more immediate revenue-related and cost saving efforts like e-commerce and customer service and support."
	Newark InOne Launches Search-based Procurement "The new search capabilities, powered by Endeca (endeca.com), produce results that can be compared and sorted by desirable dimensions, attributes or criteria. Presented in a familiar parametric search interface, the search engine allows design engineers and buyers to find products and avoid the pitfalls of traditional parametric solutions."
	Getting it Right To make its channel integration work, Office Depot uses a mixture of in-house and commercially available technology. It uses IBM's WebSphere as its e-commerce platform, a customer data warehouse from NCR Corp. that gathers data from each shopping channel, web analytics from Coremetrics Inc. and site search and navigation technology from Endeca Technologies Inc.
	dabs.com in 500k makeover "It hopes to boost its conversion rate by up to 50 per cent and increase the value of sales by improving the site's search and navigation features using technology from software developer Endeca."
	The Trend-setting Products of 2005 "In each and every case, the thoughtfulness and elegance of the software certainly warrants further investigation....Endeca ProFindTM for Enterprise Search Guided navigation for intranets, portals, corporate Web sites, information-based sites, call centers and commerce and catalog sites."
	Beckett will soon sport improved site search "Better site search will also help Beckett, which generates estimated annual e-commerce revenues of about $13 million, provide more detailed price information such as price guides for specific collectibles such as baseball cards. 'We will have the ability to highlight topics such as best sellers, new items and expert picks, which are all relevant to the collector's shopping session,' Grimsley says."
	FurnitureFind.com finds move to online sales easier than expected "FurnitureFind.com is continuing to build out its e-commerce strategy, both on its own site as well as through an expanding network of affiliates. To help keep down its return rate while helping shoppers find what they want, it's working with site search firm Endeca Technologies Inc. to develop a site and navigation feature that will let shoppers drill down by product attributes."
	Oriental Trading trades up for better site search and analytics "The Endeca package replaced an internally developed program and helps Oriental Trading do a better job in cross selling and up selling its merchandise, says vice president of e-commerce Steve Fortson."
	Newegg hatches plans for better site search and expanded payment "Newegg.com will use a new emphasis on consumer electronics and site improvements in a bid to grow its web sales by at least 40% in 2005. Newegg, which ranks as No. 9 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, anticipates that its e-commerce sales will increase to about $1.4 billion this year, compared to $1 billion in 2004. To achieve that goal, Newegg is adding more consumer electronics products to its web store and improving its internal site search using new applications from Endeca Technologies Inc."
	Scripps Makes ShopatHomeTV.com its e-commerce anchor " Now ShopatHomeTV.com, which ranks as No. 212 on the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is putting in place the finishing touches on a major site redesign that Scripps began in November. The web store is using new site search applications from Endeca Technologies Inc. and improving guided navigation to reduce the time and steps shoppers need to locate merchandise, Smith says."
	Me Too! "Chicago Public Library has contracted with TLC for all basic ILS functionality in CARL.X, as well as AquaBrowser Library, Endeca Guided Navigation, OSA collection development, and e-commerce modules -- a project valued at nearly $14 million."
	Endeca Announces New Search and Analysis Solutions " Built on Endeca's Search and Guided Navigation platform, the solutions are designed to help government agencies deploy retrieval capabilities for public-facing Web sites and internal information management applications. All of the new solutions feature Endeca's patent-pending Guided Navigation technology, which combines the two most common approaches to finding information--search and browse--into one capability. These solutions are designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies discovery capabilities into both their structured and unstructured intelligence repositories--allowing intelligence and law enforcement analysts to find and analyze critical information buried in vast repositories of records, documents, email messages and virtually any other source."
	IBM looks to open source search "IBM is today expected to announce open source availability of its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a content-based search framework used to interpret hidden relationships in unstructured information. Key information management and business intelligence vendors such as Cognos, Endeca, Factiva, Inxight, SAS, and SPSS are set to throw their weight behind the initiative, by embedding UIMA into their offerings."
	In Search of Intelligent Search "We had a mountain of information and no effective way to go through it," Glinsky says. "Now we're getting better value out of millions of dollars of research and influencing decisions that can create hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue."
	HomeDepot.com blends search, navigation functions; sees conversion lift "Thoughtful vendor selection and implementation are allowing Home Depot to drive revenue and customers' satisfaction through a single functional interface," according to [JupiterResearch analyst, Eric] Peterson.
	Better search drives sales at JCWhitney.com "The goal of the design is to more quickly present relevant product to our customers and make the overall shopping experience easier to use," says Geoff Robertson, vice president of e-commerce for J.C. Whitney. "With such a large selection of automotive parts and accessories, our challenge is to make finding the right item for their vehicle as simple, as accurate, and as enjoyable as possible."
	Endeca and Oculus partner Initially deployed in Endeca Latitude, the joint offering will expose anomalies and patterns in data and will provide insight not possible with tables, dials or simple dashboards. The combined technology from Endeca and Oculus lets users move through an analysis more fluidly, with context, to get answers not possible with traditional business intelligence solutions.
	Ace: The helpful search place "...our current search engine required updating to overcome some fundamental challenges-from synonyms to misspellings and even how different products were categorized. Endeca has provided Ace with a solution that not only addresses those common stumbling blocks, but takes search a step further, giving our retail associates the ability to intuitively and effortlessly filter results and explore related products." Frank Murphy, retail IT manager with Ace Hardware Corp
	Endeca Announces New Manufacturing and Distribution Search Solutions The solutions are designed to help manufacturers and suppliers boost parts reuse and strategic sourcing initiatives, improve customer service, drive online sales and reduce costs by making it easier for people to find products, parts and components information. Endeca has worked extensively with leading manufacturers, suppliers and business-to-business catalogers including John Deere and IBM.
	NIH cancer site gets faster search "The types of information these different audiences were seeking vary greatly; what might be most relevant to one could be completely irrelevant to another, so one-size-fits-all relevancy ranking simply doesn't work."
	Endeca Provides Latitude for Information Retrieval and Analysis " 'Endeca allows you to replace the custom reporting cycle with self-service reporting and analysis, so you're cutting out the middleman -- which in our case was IT. Now, our employees can get answers directly and cut out the inherent iterative processes to get the right answer,' said Brendan Nolan, senior vice president of distribution technology at MFS. 'We've tried to do this in the past with other BI tools, but they never took hold. Our end users are experts in their own world, but they're not experts in writing reports. Unless it's really easy to use, adoption rates will be minimal.' " Paula J. Hane
	Searchandizing: Site Search as the New Display Window -- With a Personalized Twist "At eToys, more organized and broader shopping options presented through [Endeca InFront] site search results have led to a 25% increase in the average number of pages viewed per search, from 8 to 10, says CIO Chris Cummings. 'That means guided navigation is bringing people through more products and helping them find what they`re looking for,' he says. 'The more we interact with the customer, the more likely we`ll convert that customer to a sale.' " Paul Demery
	Beyond Googling "Cambridge-based Endeca has pioneered a search solution that even Google is lauding. Guided Navigation will play an increasingly large role in the future of search, and Endeca is holding the key." William Quist
	Globalization and Search Take Center Stage "One of the reasons the annual PC Forum, an invitation-only gathering of industry leaders, policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs, is so interesting is the eclectic nature of the discussions held there. This year, the 28th year of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based event was no exception, as leaders and visionaries talked of the global nature of technology and the newfound prominence of search in all forms....Endeca exhibited a solution that uses classification techniques to provide guided navigation through large data sets, such as a parts catalog." Michael J. Miller
	Business Analysis Tools Gaining in Visualization "Endeca's new Latitude product uses the same Guided Navigation interface that the company's search tools are known for; it also adds charting and visualization capabilities. Latitude can be used to merge analysis of structured and unstructured data, and it enables search queries on structured data or mixes of structured and unstructured data, said officials in Cambridge, Mass." Dennis Callaghan
	DollarDays.com relaunches with new search and merchandising features DollarDays sells about 30,000 general merchandise products, including toys, household décor, apparel, electronics and seasonal merchandise. The redesigned site uses site search technology from Endeca Technologies Inc. integrated with an in-house content management system to improve the way users can search and navigate for products, Joseph says.
	IT revs up search engines "...it wasn't long before Pepin and his team started to see how Endeca also could help CBD reduce the time it took to roll out marketing campaigns. 'We saw it was also a great data-mining tool, which made it a good fit for direct-marketed, targeted e-mails to our customer base,' he says. Before using ProFind, it took several hours to run a traditional database query. 'With Endeca's ability to slice and dice our data, we could load up all of our separate customer information - purchase history, author history, product categories - on a separate platform. We were then able to quickly segment the list. We could go and mine customers, clicking on anybody who had purchased a particular author in the past, and it would literally bring back information in seconds,' Pepin says." Michelle Hope
	On-target onsite search "Before upgrading its search function, Bass says, eToys offered only basic refinement options for customers to narrow down product results by attributes such as product type. Now the engine allows for refining searches by the same 17 categories it searches with. All details for eToys search function were determined during strategic requirement meetings with Endeca. The changes, Bass says, have resulted in higher conversion rates and a 20%-25% increase in page views." Heather Retzlaff
	My Kingdom for an OPAC "Exhibiting one of the most remarkable refinement tools, Endeca (endeca.com) creates a 'metarelational index' where result sets are refined on-the-fly to match patron limits of name, subject, format, or locally defined fields....This front-end and back-end addition to bibliographic discovery could revolutionize the OPAC." Andrew Pace
	Narrowing the search "Search isn't just for data and text, of course. As Tim Hardy, chief technology officer at World Book Inc., publisher of The World Book Encyclopedia, can tell you, there's a multitude of formats out there that a searcher may need to access. That was the situation confronting the IT staff when they sought a search tool for World Book's Web encyclopedia. The encyclopedia provides access not only to World Book's 25,400 articles and 248,000 definitions, but also to 9,300 audio clips, 1,480 maps, 128 photographs and 115 video clips. Today, Chicago-based World Book uses Endeca Technologies Inc.'s ProFind and XML metadata to create a unified index of materials. 'We have an XML database for each of the different content types that provides the indexable data. Now we're able to place all the differing content types into one integrated index,' says Hardy."
	TJX goes multichannel at last "To re-create on the Web the in-store excitement of hunting for treasures,' Fry used a search engine from Cambridge, MA-based Endeca Technologies that allows customers to browse products by brand, size, and price, among other options. The technology, Fry says, gives shoppers a similar browsability as in the stores."
	Navigating Walgreens Customers to the Walgreens.com online pharmacy and drugstore are using a new search solution to shop more easily for products and to find general information about the site. Walgreen Co. has selected Endeca InFront to provide search, navigation and merchandising across Walgreens.com.