New year introductions

Hello out there - I've been enjoying this interesting group.

I'm Pete Bell from Endeca, a software company based in Cambridge, MA 
with regional sales offices around the US, UK, and Europe. Since 
1999, we've been developing Search and Guided Navigation software 
that makes it easier for people to find information at corporate 
information portals and intranets, government, and ecommerce sites.

What is Guided Navigation? It's Endeca's brand name for our flavor of 
faceted search and navigation. (I like to separate faceted search and 
navigation from faceted classification, since the two aren't always 
paired, and both have their intricacies. As I've worked with you in 
the IA community over the past few years, I've become very interested 
in the interplay between faceted classification, and faceted search 
and navigation. It's fertile grounds for research since large scale 
implementations are so new.)
Some of the distinguishing elements of Guided Navigation:
-Massive scale: Examples of commercial deployments run on over 1 
billion records, thousands of facets, millions of categories within a 
hierarchical facet, and terabytes of records, while maintaining the 
same fast speeds you see on our smaller deployments, all while 
incrementally updating data.
-Enterprise strength: Takes records and facets from nearly any source 
system with packaged adaptors and APIs (e.g. content management 
systems, databases, ERP, CRM, PLM), format (225 file formats), and 
language (over 250). It's based on a platform that makes it easy to 
develop applications, built around open standards and rich APIs, with 
friendly GUI tools that reflect the business processes needed to 
create and maintain applications.
-Innovative faceted search and browse features: Includes extensive 
controls to iteratively relevance rank the facets, and the categories 
within each facet; and clever search features for multi-term queries 
that cross facets.
-Committed R&D: We've invested well over 100 person years in Guided 
Navigation, and continue to invest heavily in pure research in this 
fascinating field.
 
Over 100 customers run Guided Navigation in close to 150 commercial 
deployments. Some public-facing implementations include Barnes & 
Noble's BookBrowser, IBM (e.g. the Notebook Finder, linked on their 
front page), and KB Toys. Many other deployments are behind 
firewalls, like In-Q-Tel (an advanced technology arm of the CIA), and 
the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. 

PeterV, I see from a quick web search on you that you're not a fan of 
Endeca ("They hide details behind wades of marketing blab though. 
They have a (painful) flash demo that shows something of the 
interface: it seems a klunky implementation of a faceted search.") 
Nevertheless, if any masochists out there want to see more, please 
visit the painful flash demo I built at www.endeca.com/demos, and if 
you want to learn more about any of our commercial deployments, feel 
free to email me off-line.

Pete 


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Thanks for playing. 

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