Today, I add Endeca to the Fifty Content Companies that Matter.
Endeca offers a variation on search which they call Guided Navigation. Guided Navigation is a fairly simple concept, which enables users to drill down on various attributes of their search results, to continually narrow and refine the results.
Endeca’s core market is the e-Commerce space, with their Endeca InFront® product. Their strength is their ability to combine unstructured and structured data to enable users to quickly find relevant results. InFront® is used by numerous e-commerce sites including Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, Petco, WalMart and others. For a good example of how InFront® improves the search process, take a look at the CircuitCity.com website. Enter “DVD” in the search box and you’ll get nearly 50,000 results. On the left of the screen, you’ll see all the various product categories which match. And, the InFront® difference, is that it will dynamically update with the number of matches in each. If you click on “Gifts under $100” (which has 31 entries), you’ll see a dynamically updated list by brand. The Circuit City site is a simple, yet clear example of how Endeca InFront® improves the e-Commerce search process.
Endeca goes beyond e-Commerce. Their ProFind® search solutions are being deployed in the publishing space by Directory publishers such as Classmates.com, enterprise search clients such as John Deere, IBM and others, and within the government intelligence community (DIA among others).
The technology behind Endeca is powerful, but the simplicity of its interface is what makes it successful. During the past year, they have expanded their operational areas (sales, technical and customer support), enabling them to add 100 clients during that period. While users tend to think search=Google these days, within the enterprise and specialized applications like e-Commerce, there remains huge room for growth among innovators like Endeca. For that innovation, Endeca clearly is among the Fifty Content Companies that Matter.
