The Online Directories Challenge

Online directories face challenges similar to many other data-centric online businesses:

• Controlling IT costs while meeting performance demands
• Maintaining content interest and relevancy
• Keeping up with Web innovations
• Building audience loyalty
• Capturing a larger share of search engine traffic
• Boosting revenue

Exalead's Solution

Exalead CloudView™ can help you meet these challenges by providing better search and enriched content for your existing directory, or by enabling you to quickly launch a new aggregated listing service.

Key Benefits

Reduce Costs while Boosting Performance

From Zero to 4 Million Visits a Month in the First Year

When France's #1 phone directory assistance company, 118 218 Le Numéro, wanted to take their service online, they turned to Exalead. The result: a large scale 24/7 business launched in just 60 days, with traffic that soared from zero to 4 million monthly visits in the first year alone.

– Download 118 218 Case Study
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CloudView enables access to database content that is as rich yet 100s of times faster and much less expensive than traditional relational database technologies. Switching access for this primary content to the CloudView index can 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. See also Search-Based Applications, or download our whitepaper, The Hidden Costs of Scaling Search.

Bring Your Listings to Life—Instantly, Affordably

Instantly extend your own directory content by creating a "mash-up" of local and Web content (online reviews, mapping data, blog posts, etc.), or quickly launch an aggregate directory service that extracts both directory listings and related content across multiple websites.

Exalead's automated extraction, analysis and annotation tools will also enrich your existing classification schemas, providing additional faceted navigation options and giving your data a new accessibility and depth. (See our Solutions Brief, Exalead CloudView for Internet Yellow Pages.)

Serve Up the Latest Web 2.0 Innovations

Let Exalead serve as your shortcut to serving up a steady stream of rich media innovations :

• Enhanced video search
• Video (and audio) transcript searching
• Advanced text indexing and query processing
• Exclusive Wikipedia search
• Advanced image search
• Mobile search
• Social search

Test-drive the latest Exalead innovations at Exalabs.

Stabilize Fickle Audiences

Boost loyalty through more successful search, deeper content, and a more engaging, multi-faceted content presentation. Exalead's patented "Search by Serendipity"™ system can automatically exploit and extend your existing database structure, or instantly organize content extracted from the Web. Features include:

• Navigation of results by dynamically-extracted and/or pre-defined categories, including user ratings, geography, related terms, price, file type and size, language, author and more
• At-a-glance scanning of results with content extracts, file type icons and thumbnail images
• Rich, application-independent content previews with search term highlighting
• User aids like support for natural language queries and multi-language search (even using non-Latin characters), related query (and content) suggestions, and fuzzy matching tools like phonetic and approximate spelling matches and spelling corrections.

Siphon Off General Search Traffic

Become a first-stop reference for visitors with more successful search, content that is richer and closer to visitors' interests, and a user experience that is more visual, dynamic and enjoyable.

Reduce Your Dependence on Search Engine Advertising

As you build editorial value and strengthen audience loyalty to increase direct referrals, also use the CloudView platform to implement effective SEO tools, such as generating highly specific content for Web crawlers from your native content, or serving up a steady supply of fresh 'mashed-up' internal and external content to keep the Web bots coming back for more!

Increase Revenue

Exalead's patented "Search by Serendipity"™ system encourages more queries, extends the length of site visits and boosts the total number of listing views.

Partner Spotlight: Cohezia

Exalead works closely with leading eBusiness Partners like Cohezia to provide best-of-breed solutions to online businesses around the world. Headquartered in the UK, Cohezia is a global digital media solutions integrator that leverages Exalead technology to help media, publishing and business information providers rapidly create new content-driven services. These services enable Cohezia clients to better engage their online audiences and generate additional revenue streams. Learn more about the Exalead-Cohezia Partnership (PDF). View all our Channel Partners.