The Scottish Government selected exalead one:search to replace its internal legacy enterprise search system, and to open up online access to 25 years worth of official documents on its portal, www.scotland.gov.uk. Exalead was selected not just for its scalability and data-format versatility, but also for the very practical search assistance it provides users.

Exalead’s patented system of content presentation and navigation helps users get beyond what they type in the search box to find what they are truly looking for. It does this by guiding users through the search process, enabling them to refine their searches according to both pre-defined metadata and automatically-extracted information, like document type, creation date, subject matter, document category, related terms, and more. For, as the Scottish saying goes, “The tree doesn’t always fall at the first stroke.”

About the Scottish Government

Managing an annual budget of more than £30 billion in 2007-2008, the Scottish Government is responsible for most of the issues of day-to-day concern to the people of Scotland, including health, education, justice, rural affairs, and transport.

Scottish Government portal with search powered by Exalead

To thank our sales team and ace engineers for their stellar performance in 2007, Exalead decided to send the crew to Marrakesh for some well-deserved R and R.

On the agenda: camel rides, go-carts, archery…and tech seminars! Because the quest for better search never ends…

The European Commission has approved funding for QUAERO, an advanced research and development program concerned with the automatic processing of digital multimedia content. The program involves a consortium of 23 partners (including Exalead) and is headed by the Thomson group. Read the press release on Europa, the portal site of the European Union.

On February 28, Exalead, in partnership with KMWorld and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), hosted a webinar in which Exalead’s co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, ARF’s Director of Knowledge Solutions, discussed ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. They also discussed hot trends in information access, including the growing use of hybrid vertical search applications by businesses. If you missed the discussion, you can access it now on KMWorld’s webinar archive.

Exalead is participating in the 14^th annual Documation expo, March 12 and 13 at CNIT Paris, La Défense. This year’s theme: “Bringing content management and document management together.” You’ll find the Exalead team at stand D12.

Get a free visitor’s pass with the code EXA.

Learn more about Documation 2008.

As part of his series “Search Wizards Speak,” Stephen Arnold, principal analyst for the first three editions of CMS Watch’s “The Enterprise Search Report”, recently interviewed Exalead founder François Bourdoncle. On the table: Bourdoncle’s Alta Vista roots, the company’s guiding “search by serendipity” philosophy, its engineering approach, and its dedication to unified search across all platforms (desktop, enterprise, mobile, Web…).

Read the interview.