Search gets even smarter

Endeca has introduced a new series of modules that will extend the capabilities of the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP). The Endeca Discovery Suite has been designed to increase online revenue by boosting conversion rates and content consumption.

The suite's first two entries are the Social Navigation Module and Search Engine Marketing Module. Future modules will focus on personalization and recommendations, closed-loop reporting, multichannel operations and back-end integrations--all with integral support for Web 2.0 interactivity.

Endeca's Social Navigation Module can be used with best-of-breed social media software from Endeca's strategic partners, as well as in-house solutions, and includes:

content adapters that provide out-of-the-box integration between the Endeca Information Access Platform and well-known user review software;

dedicated content acquisition and indexing capabilities to ingest all types of user-generated content, regardless of source or format;

tag extraction capabilities to pull together and reveal common themes, concepts and entities from text-based reviews, blogs and posts for use in site navigation, search relevancy and search engine optimization;

tag-based visualization and navigation to complement static and dynamic site navigation, giving users more ways to explore and find desirable content and products;

meta-relational capabilities to link different content types by common concepts, allowing people to dynamically summarize the user-generated content associated with any set of products;

content aggregation abilities, combined with Endeca's patented search and guided navigation experience, enable the exploration of all reviews and other user-generated content spread across a site or collection of sites by the criteria most relevant to their goal;

profile-based navigation to help users find information and products by others with similar tastes, desires and characteristics;

reference applications to speed development time and ensure best practices for common use cases; and

on-the-fly graphical analytics components to improve customer insight and decision making by visually summarizing user-generated opinions into navigable charts and graphs.

Capabilities of the Search Engine Marketing Module include:

• a new version of Endeca Sitemap Generator to simplify the task of indexing dynamic Web pages by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search, Ask.com and other key Web search engines and support for several out-of-the-box output formats; and
• an automated URL optimization API that turns dynamic page URLs into SEO-friendly text-based URLs, giving the appearance of static, keyword-rich directory pages, resulting in higher rankings for billions of dynamic pages.