Exalead Solutions Brief
Exalead CloudView
TM
for
Internet Yellow Pages
How Cloudview is Helping Leading ITPs
Rapidly Generate More Traffic, Leads, and
Table of Contents
IYP Challenges & Opportunities in 2010 . . . .1
What is CloudView? . . . .1
Increase Your Revenue . . . .2
1. Build Your Audience & Generate More Leads . . . .2
A. Serve Up Richer Content - Instantly . . . .2
B. Offer a More Engaging User Experience . . . .4
C. Improve Your Search Engine Visibility . . . .5
D. Provide More Successful Search . . . .5
2. Expand Advertiser Exposure . . . .6
A. Sell Exposure on Vertical Directories . . . .6
B. Sell Exposure on Social Networks . . . .6
C. Cross-Sell and Upsell Listings . . . .7
3. Drive Revenue with New Services & Tools . . . .7
A. Sell E-Reputation Monitoring . . . .7
B. Equip Your Sales Team with New Customer Insights . . . .8
Reduce Your Expenses . . . .9
1. Cut Your Infrastructure Costs . . . .9
2. Reduce Your Development Costs . . . .9
Gain New Agility . . . .10
1. Reduce Your Time to Market . . . .10
2. Innovate Continuously . . . .10
3. Scale on Demand . . . .11
IYP Challenges & Opportunities in 2010
While declining print revenues, competition from search engines (e.g., Google Maps Lucky 7 Pack), and niche topical and regional directories will continue to put pressure on Yellow Page operators this year, revenue for Internet Yellow Page (IYP) sites continued its steady growth in 2009, a success likely to be repeated this year as IYPs launch new search engine partnerships, develop multi-channel advertising packages, and beef up their online services. To accomplish these goals, and achieve the timeless business objectives of augmenting revenue, reducing costs and increasing agility, innovative IYPs are harnessing the next-generation search and information access technology, Exalead CloudViewTM.
What is CloudView?
Uniquely engineered for both the Web and the enterprise, CloudView is a one-of-a-kind search engine that combines Web-style simplicity, speed and scalability with structured data access more commonly associated with database applications than search engines.
On the back end, CloudView can index high volumes of structured data (such as directory databases), retaining all the multi-faceted classification information these resources contain, as well as large volumes of unstructured content (such as Web pages, RSS feeds, and multimedia content), automatically organizing and classifying all this disparate data into a single structured resource. On the front end, users can search this unified resource in familiar Web style, with a natural language
query entered into a single text box. However, what they receive back is deeply textured, with results automatically structured according to your business rules. And as data is accessed via the CloudView index rather than directly from a database, the system scales effortlessly and without limits. CloudView further delivers sub-second responsiveness using exceptionally lean resources, indexing in real-time up to 100 million documents and processing 20 queries per second on a single low-cost server.
Let’s now look at how IYPs are using CloudView to increase revenue, reduce costs, and gain new business agility.
Use CloudView To:
Increase Your Revenue • Attract New Advertisers
• Strengthen Advertiser Loyalty
• Augment Revenue Per Advertiser
Reduce Your Expenses • Cut Development Costs
• Reduce Infrastructure Costs
Increase Your Agility
• Respond More Quickly and Effectively to Change
• Stay Abreast of New Technologies
Online businesses from directories to media and publishing, e-classifieds, social networks and e-commerce are boosting their revenue with CloudView-powered search and information access
Increase Your Revenue
1. Build Your Audience & Generate More Leads
As a first step toward increasing their revenues, IYPs are seeking to build site traffic through an improved, well-differentiated user experience. Improving this experience begins with developing better, more finely targeted content, a task CloudView can automate and render uncommonly effective.
A.
Serve Up Richer Content - Instantly
1. Extract Data from Advertiser Websites
First, CloudView enables IYPs to enrich their advertiser listings with data extracted directly from advertiser websites, data such as opening hours, locations, specialties, customer service information, etc.
CloudView’s semantic processors automatically classify and categorize this data and merge it with the profiles in your own directory database. And the platform will automatically update your own enhanced listings when website data changes.
2. Extract Information from Community Resources
Beyond advertiser websites, you can use CloudView to locate and extract advertiser information from community resources like city and regional websites or topical portals.
CloudView can independently scan these sites for listing pages by analyzing headers like “Contacts,” “Services,” “Professionals,” or “Businesses,” and then extract relevant pieces of information.
More Traffic, More Leads, More Advertisers
3. Extract Advertiser Information from the Web-At-Large
To create the kind of truly rich listings that advertisers, users and search engines love, use CloudView to further enhance advertiser listings with:
• Customer reviews
• Media coverage
• Blog posts
• Photos, and more
CloudView’s semantic engine can further apply semantic analysis to this content to build rich tag clouds that function like visual, at-a-glance reviews. Together with the detailed information drawn from advertiser websites and community listings, this extracted content will help your plain vanilla database listings spring to life - instantly, effortlessly.
...Even Incorporate Content from Social Networks
You can even use CloudView to capture data from social networks, especially important now as more businesses are taking on ‘social marketing,’ with a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. This type of information can also help you flesh out your White Pages listings, traditionally very thin, with content from social networking sites (especially important for capturing the “younger” audience). At the same time, CloudView’s data normalization functions can help you master your WP listings to IYP quality standards. A Typical YP Listing Enhanced With Internet Content Extracted by Exalead CloudView
Before
After
B.
Offer a More Engaging User Experience
1. Beyond Detailed Listings, Generate Deep Content Around Headings
Offering more richly detailed listings will dramatically enhance your user experience, as can other improvements like furnishing deep vertical content from the Web for each of your headings. Exalead can deliver such content directly from its public Web index, clustered by categories such as:
• Advice & Info
• Consumer Reviews
• Media Articles
• Ideas & Tips
• Wikipedia
• Websites (8 billion pages)
• Images (2 billion)
• Videos (400 million)
Leading online retailers like Amazon don’t deliver the same content no matter what kind of product or service a user is seeking, so why should an IYP? Selling leads and selling products are fundamentally similar undertakings, and ecommerce vendors have known for a decade that serving up deep, context-sensitive content deepens user engagement, prolongs site visits and boosts conversion rates.
2. Offer Rich Mapping
You can also enhance your user experience by adding search-based mapping. Normally mapping is a very expensive undertaking for IYPs, consuming enormous IS resources.
Now Exalead makes it easy and affordable to offer this capability to your users, whether you simply
want to display business locations from a search on a map, or go one step further and let your users refine their searches from within a map, zooming in on a particular area or street, specifying a radius around a point of interest, or even drawing a free-form polygon to localize their search.
C.
Improve Your Search Engine Visibility
Beyond a better user experience, this enriched content can significantly improve your search engine visibility—a critical factor in building your audience and increasing advertiser exposure. Developed using advanced mash-up technologies, the millions of rich content pages CloudView can generate are not typical ‘dynamic’ search results pages, but rather the kind of stable (seemingly ‘static’) landing pages that search engines prefer, with content that is both deep, and deeply contextualized.
D.
Provide More Successful Search
CloudView supports ‘natural language’ querying. What does this mean for your users? It means they can simply type their questions or keywords in a single text box, and CloudView can ‘break apart’ and understand the request, automatically mapping it to appropriate headings—according to your business logic (premium advertiser placement and presentation, etc.). No longer will you need to resort to complex forms to enforce your business rules and ensure highly specific, accurate results.
In addition, CloudView offers ‘forgiving’ search, helping users find what they need even if they don’t precisely or accurately formulate their request. CloudView interprets imprecise requests and offers spelling corrections and close matches (phonetic and approximate spelling matches, synonym matching, etc.), suggests related searches, and proposes related content. Search results are automatically ‘clustered’ to further aid users in quickly and successfully finding the information they need. And of course, more successful search equals more leads.
From one text box, CloudView delivers the results users expect using your business rules
Though the user mistyped “denttist,” CloudView returns relevant results for dentists.
2. Expand Advertiser Exposure
It’s easy to see that a larger audience with site visitors running more numerous and more successful queries translates to more leads, helping you better attract and retain advertisers. But CloudView can aid you in augmenting your advertiser revenue in other ways as well.
A.
Sell Exposure on Vertical Directories
First, you can expand exposure for your advertisers by, in essence, joining the competition. CloudView’s unique technology makes it possible to develop and deploy vertical regional or heading-centered directories in just a few weeks, at a very affordable cost. Their very specialization is what has enabled vertical engines to continue to do well in a highly competitive market: they draw highly targeted traffic and deliver quality leads.
And when constructed using CloudView mash-up technologies, such websites enjoy strong organic search engine visibility.
B.
Sell Exposure on Social Networks
You can also use Exalead Wikifier technology to syndicate advertiser information across social networks. What is the Wikifier? On any site on which it is deployed, Exalead Wikifier highlights terms indexed in Wikipedia. When users pass their mouse over one of these terms, content and links from Wikipedia are displayed in a small window. Using the same technology, you can arrange with a social network to
have your advertiser information similarly presented when their name (or even a sponsored keyword) appears in that network’s content. Such ‘ads’ have a high click-through rate because users perceive them more as information than advertising as they are positioned within the user’s own familiar, trusted community.
Increase Your Revenue
Classifieds aggregator Yakaz was deployed in just a few weeks as well by a team of only 3 people Dedicated exclusively to
vertical search related to home furnishings, Dekio is operated by just one person and went live in only a few weeks
C.
Cross-Sell and Upsell Listings
As with delivering context-sensitive content and navigation, IYPs could borrow another tried-and-true tactic of successful ecommerce sites by cross-sellling and upselling leads. Without impacting your existing lead-generation strategy, you can boost the number of leads per visit by complementing a user’s search results with ads for related products and services. If a user is searching for a hotel in Lower Manhattan, why not also display ads for restaurants, taxis, entertainment venues and more in the same neighborhood?
In a similar way, you can generate more leads by offering ‘upsell’ suggestions, for example, displaying an ad for a limousine service if a user performs a search for taxicab companies. Beyond generating more leads per visit, this strategy can also open the door to new premium placement offerings.
Whatever approach you choose, you can configure upselling and cross-selling options according to your unique marketing objectives, and use CloudView’s powerful statistical tools to continually refine the effectiveness of your program.
3. Drive Revenue with New Services & Tools
A.
Sell E-Reputation Monitoring
You can use your agile new CloudView platform to develop innovative value-added services such as e-reputation monitoring, which consists of analyzing and reporting on a business’s reputation as represented in Internet content such as reviews, blogs, forums, social networks and media articles.
Savvy businesses know that their online reputation can shift (for better or worse) in the blink of an eye, with a tremendous bottom line impact, and that e-reputation monitoring provides an effective means of swiftly crafting and executing communications and marketing plans in response to these changes.
This type of innovative service is especially appealing to sectors that have historically resisted the value proposition of IYPs, such as restaurants and entertainment venues.
B.
Equip Your Sales Team with New Customer Insights
You can further leverage your new CloudView platform to more effectively sell both new and existing services by equipping your team with new customer and market insights. In just a few weeks, using minimal resources, you can use CloudView to enrich your existing CRM and customer support systems with intelligence gleaned from your website logs...updated in real time, and operated completely nonintrusively to underlying systems.
What could such precise, real-time intelligence on user behavior and site performance do for your business? Below are just a few examples:
• Sales Campaigns: Generate a list of all florist customers who have only a basic listing but have visited the premium advertising section of your site this month, and start dialing!
• Contact Center - Prospect: When a prospect calls, immediately wow them with vital statistics: “In your category and location, we are generating an average of X leads a day!”
• Sales Call: When planning a sales call, your agent can gather persuasive facts in a flash, such as “Last week, you missed 500 leads from people looking for a (plumber, dentist, florist, etc.) in your neighborhood.”
• Strategic Planning: Senior management can also benefit from faster, more effective decision making with at-a-glance visual reporting based on any criteria they choose, such as analyzing market demand by geography, time, or user profile.
To give you a better sense of how powerful an aid to CRM search-based technologies can be, below is an example of a complete CloudView-powered CRM application developed in only a few weeks for a large multinational bank.
Increase Your Revenue
Left: A true 360° view of each customer through unified access to all customer data. Completely non-intrusive to source systems. Simple Web-style navigation. At-a-glance upsell and cross-sell suggestions.
Above: Endless filtering options for creating precisely targeted campaigns. One-click save and export. Right: On-the-fly
reporting and analysis using simple text box querying. Supports any volume of data. Updates in real-time.
Reduce Your Expenses
1. Cut Your Infrastructure Costs
Deploying a CloudView SBA enables you to significantly offload your databases, and to scale information access without having to scale underlying database systems. This can yield significant savings in licensing, hardware and administrative costs.
In addition, CloudView uses on average 1/5th of the hardware resources of competitors, providing real-time indexing of 100
million documents and processing 20 queries per second on a single commodity server—all while providing advanced semantic features like dynamic categorization and clustering.
118218
• 40 million records (yellow pages and white pages)
• Hybrid Web/database content mashup
• 40 queries per second (QPS) per server • 3 servers
ViaMichelin
• 15 million points of interest (hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc.) • 800 QPS • 150 milliseconds per query • 8 servers2. Reduce Your Development Costs
CloudView also offers significant savings on development costs, typically deploying in only a matter of weeks. Examples:
•
118218
: Proof-of-concept to go-live: 2 months•
ViaMichelin
: Proof-of-concept to go-live: 3 months•
PagesJaunes:
Proof-of-concept to go-live: 3 monthsSwitching to CloudView enabled these clients to slash their costs:
• Rightmove: 83% Savings • Gefco: 50% Savings • fish4: 60% Savings
Gain New Agility
1. Reduce Your Time to Market
Slashing development time not only saves money, it is crucial for surviving in the fast-moving, highly competitive world of the Internet. Beyond initial deployment, CloudView provides an agile base for rapidly constructing new applications. Application agility is assured by CloudView’s fully unified platform for information access, reporting and search; its SOA architecture; its API framework; and its support for standard Web technologies (SOAP, REST, XML, RSS, RDF, and OWL, etc.).
2. Innovate Continuously
As a CloudView customer, you can benefit as well from the continual stream of rich media innovations issuing forth from Exalead’s R&D labs, including:
• Search inside of video (see Voxalead at labs.exalead.com)
• Wikipedia search (see Wikifier at labs.exalead.com)
• Search visualization (see Constellation at labs.exalead.com)
• Mobile search
• Advanced image search (see Chromatik at labs.exalead.com)
• Social search (see Baagz and Tweepz at labs.exalead.com)
• Relationship detection and mapping (see Miiget at labs.exalead.com)
• Ongoing innovation in semantic extraction and processing for text and multimedia
Through your partnership with Exalead, you have the capability to quickly and affordably offer your customers (or internal staff) innovative services that will keep you a step ahead of your competition.
3. Scale on Demand
Engineered for Web-scale processing, CloudView is the only enterprise search engine designed from inception for multibillion document scalability. More importantly, CloudView scales rapidly and cost effectively: simply add inexpensive commodity hardware—no painful migration required.
With CloudView, you can scale almost instantly to meet any evolving business need:
• An Increase in Users: The platform scales to an unlimited user base, with a proven capacity to serve millions of users
• A Need for New Features and Functionality: CloudView offers extensive built-in functionality with full administrator control over feature activation and configuration; APIs can be used to further extend functionality as desired
• An Increase in Data Volume: Index build and query processing services can easily be distributed across commodity servers; built-in index partitioning and replication services further extend performance and availability
• A Rise in Simultaneous Queries: The platform’s average throughput is 20 queries per second (QPS) per server, and throughput can be easily scaled by distributing query processing across multiple servers
• A Need for a Faster Index Refresh Rate: CloudView supports any data refresh strategy desired: 1) real-time, 2) interval, and 3) “just in time” (on query reception). Dictionaries, thesauri, etc., are automatically updated as the index is updated
IYP & CloudView: A Perfect Match
In conclusion, CloudView is a game-changing tool that is helping innovative IYPs increase their revenue, reduce costs and gain new business agility. CloudView is helping IYPs generate more revenue by helping them build their audiences, therefore generating more (and better) leads for advertisers. CloudView is enabling IYPs to:
• Serve up multi-dimensional listings and rich related content - instantly and effortlessly
• Offer a more engaging, interactive, and visual user experience
• Improve search engine visibility and organic traffic
• Provide more natural and successful search
CloudView can also aid IYPs in expanding their advertisers’ exposure to vertical directories and social networks while generating more leads through upselling and cross-selling of listings for related products and services. IYPs can further leverage CloudView to augment their revenues by offering new services like e-reputation monitoring, and by providing IYP sales teams with more effective tools, like real-time marketing intelligence.
At the same time, CloudView is helping IYPs cut their IT outlays with reduced infrastructure and development costs, and bringing these organizations new agility by speeding the time to market for new services and applications, by swiftly scaling on demand, and by helping IYPs deliver a continual stream of rich media innovations.
Call us today at one of the locations on the following page to learn more about the advantages Exalead’s search-based technologies can bring to your IYP business.
Call us today to learn why so many of the top online directories, classifieds, entertainment portals, ecommerce sites, and social networks rely on Exalead for innovative information access, search & reporting
About Exalead
Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead is a global software provider in the information access and enterprise and Web search markets. More than 250 companies worldwide and 100 million unique users a month rely on Exalead's information access platform to search, discover, and manage their information assets for faster, smarter decision-making, real-time unified data access, and improved productivity.
Exalead’s team includes industry-leading experts in information search, non-structured data analysis, and natural language processing. This team has concentrated its R&D efforts on meeting its clients’ need to collect, transform, index, and search arbitrarily complex data from heterogeneous sources.
As a result, the Exalead CloudView product has emerged as a uniquely successful platform for automatically structuring very high volumes of nonstructured data, such as email messages, Office documents, presentations, Web pages, blogs, forums, and RSS feeds, and meaningfully synthesizing this data with structured content.
CloudView is currently being deployed for Enterprise Search, Embedded Search for OEMs/ISVs, and Search-Based Applications including:
• Extended Business Applications (harnessing unstructured data to enhance enterprise applications like BI, SCM, CRM, ERP and Compliance)
• Innovative Web Applications (search and intelligent mash-ups for high traffic websites)
• Improved Database Applications (database offloading and agile development for information access, operational reporting, and comprehensive business applications) For more information, please visit http://www.exalead.com/software. The company’s public WWW search engine is accessible at http://www.exalead.com/search.
Exalead UK 33 Cavendish Square London W1G 0PW Tel: +44 (0)207 182 4003 Fax: +44 (0)207 182 4181 Exalead Germany Niederlassung Deutschland Robert-Bosch-Strasse 7 64293 Darmstadt Tel: +49 6151 35 99 690-0 Fax: +49 6151 35 99 690-35 Exalead Italy
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Tel: +1 (415) 230 3800 Fax: +1 (415) 230 3850
