The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com
The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com
The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com
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Endeca: Facing <strong>the</strong> facets<br />
BY DAVID WEINBERGER<br />
We first covered Endeca in last month’s issue of Release 1.0, “Taxonomies to Tags: From<br />
Trees to Piles of Leaves,” by David Weinberger. We’ve reprinted Weinberger’s profile of<br />
<strong>the</strong> <strong>com</strong>pany here.<br />
No matter how overwhelming our e-mail and scheduling information looks to us,<br />
it’s a bouquet of daisies <strong>com</strong>pared with <strong>the</strong> informational jungles large organizations<br />
quickly grow. Faceted classification scales up quite nicely, but getting it right requires<br />
taxonomic and content expertise as well as software that can handle huge <strong>com</strong>putational<br />
problems fast enough to keep up with a user casually clicking through a series<br />
of screens.<br />
“For <strong>the</strong> first year, when Endeca was under wraps, its working name was Optigrab,”<br />
says founder and CEO Steve Papa. “But when a prospect noticed that we’d named it<br />
after <strong>the</strong> little handle on eyeglasses invented by a Steve Martin character, we changed<br />
it to Endeca.” <strong>The</strong> name refers to “entdecken,” German for “discover,” a word that’s<br />
not only appropriate but is also free of any reference to <strong>the</strong> movie <strong>The</strong> Jerk. Endeca is<br />
now doing big business – doubling revenues year to year, and having its first $10million<br />
quarter – with organizations such as IBM, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and<br />
<strong>the</strong> Library of Congress.<br />
Endeca organizes large sets of data into faceted classification systems – dynamic,<br />
hierarchical trees that <strong>the</strong> user navigates to find what she’s looking for. Faceted classification<br />
may look like <strong>the</strong> parametric searches featured on many e-<strong>com</strong>merce sites,<br />
but <strong>the</strong>y’re different. For example, at electronics retailer NewEgg.<strong>com</strong>, users shopping<br />
for digital cameras can specify <strong>the</strong> details of any of 13 parameters, from manufacturer<br />
to <strong>the</strong> type of memory stick, and see only <strong>the</strong> cameras that match those<br />
selections. But that’s not yet faceted classification, explains Papa. <strong>The</strong> NewEgg system<br />
lets users specify <strong>the</strong> parameters to find all Nikon, 5-megapixel cameras for<br />
under $50, even though <strong>the</strong>re are no results. Endeca’s system, on <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r hand,<br />
dynamically adjusts <strong>the</strong> parameters so that users are never given choices that lead to<br />
null result sets. <strong>The</strong> result is what Endeca calls “guided navigation.” Papa points to a<br />
demo Endeca constructed in-house using 90,000 reviews from <strong>the</strong> Wine Spectator<br />
database. Each review can be sorted on any of nine facets, including <strong>the</strong> type of wine,<br />
country, price range, year and winery. So far, it sounds like NewEgg. But if you say<br />
you want to see only wines with very high ratings, <strong>the</strong> checkboxes for <strong>the</strong> lower end<br />
of price range disappear, because <strong>the</strong>re are no extremely good, cheap wines. Ask for a<br />
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