Endeca releases faster, more flexible search engine

Search engine vendor Endeca [1] announced this week the release of McKinley, their new search development platform. More than a search engine that you plug into the enterprise information infrastructure, McKinley is a search development platform built from the ground up to allow developers to take advantage of recent innovation in processing power and to expose the search function as a service that enterprise customers can access in ways that make sense to them using industry standards like Soap and XQuery.

Sue Feldman [2], who is IDC [3]'s Research Vice President, Content Technologies Group, likes this approach. “It's been apparent for some time that new information access architectures are a requirement if customers are to get a better handle on their businesses, and Endeca has been one of the vendors at the forefront of developing these,” she says. “With the ability to search across more data more quickly, as well as the necessary tools to empower the user, Endeca is making it simpler for every consumer of information to make better and more informed decisions.”

Paul Sonderegger, who is Endeca's Chief Strategist says one of the Beta customers was the Financial Times of London's online Newssift [4] service. He says, like the rest of the news business, the FT faced pressures related to the commoditization of news. It was looking for a way to provide differentiated service to enable its target customers, investor pros and analysts to sift through the news to find the nuggets of information that could affect stock prices one way or the other. In fact, they built a sophisticated search application on top of McKinley, which pulls more than 8,000 feeds and crawls using advanced RDF and OWL ontologies. Sonderegger says this enables the FT to offer visitors guided navigation, filtering, sifting and sorting.

"We partnered with Endeca to launch Newssift.com, a revolutionary site that monitors business news and the ever-changing landscape of ideas and opinions, facts and supposition. Endeca's new platform is the foundation for our robust news site that provides customers with the ability to quickly sift through large amounts of content to make informed business decisions," says John Greenleaf, Chief Marketing Officer, Financial Times Search, Newssift.com.

The center piece of this new release is the MDEX engine, which lets companies like the Financial Times build applications to suit their needs. This ability to build custom applications on top of Endeca's core search technology means customers can create applications to suit their unique needs, rather than trying to make the core search engine work for them.

For more information:
- see the Endeca press release [5]

Related Articles:
One on One with Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca [6]
Can Google dominate enterprise search? [7]