This week Natalya takes our CEO spotlight and shines it on François Bourdoncle, President and Chief Executive Officer of Exalead, the “Search by Serendipity” search engine.


François is a pioneer of the search engine software market.  In 2000 he co-founded Exalead with the goal of revolutionizing the search engine software market by providing users with a unified technology platform to access information in the enterprise.

Prior to Exalead, Bourdoncle was a researcher at both Digital Paris Research Laboratory and Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. While at Ecole des Mines de Paris, he collaborated with Patrice Bertin, an Exalead co-founder and the company’s chief technology officer, on the LiveTopics project for AltaVista.

Bourdoncle holds a PhD. in computer science from Paris-based École Polytechnique. He is the author of several various technical papers and publications, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

In 1995 you were at AltaVista. Please tell us what you took away from that experience.

I am a researcher at heart and consider myself to be one of the lucky ones to have had the opportunity to be a part of the search engine community from the very beginning. I began my career as an early researcher for AltaVista, specifically working on the LiveTopics project.

When did you first come up with the idea for Exalead?

So many people don’t know exactly what they’re looking for at the onset of a search and therefore, people don’t know how to formulate a query properly, or where to search for given information. I have always believed that search is a necessity, but the challenge was that it was too hard. People needed a simpler, more natural way to search, whether for business or pleasure. That is when I came up with the idea of Search By Serendipity™, whereby a search engine should be able to help you find what you’re looking for even if you don’t exactly know what that is or where to find it.

I quickly realized that a unified approach would be key for success and adoption. Combining my passion for and knowledge of search, Patrice Bertin, Exalead’s other cofounder, and I developed what we now call exalead one:search™. It’s the first, truly unified search technology platform that serves as the foundation for our entire line of search products (desktop, enterprise, datacenter, Web).

What was your goal in creating Exalead? Can you please elaborate on your vision?

Exalead one:search™ delivers on our original vision – providing users with a single access point to data, regardless of format or location. Unified information access is not a goal for Exalead, it is at the core of our strategy, and is already a reality for our customers. We have named our technology exalead one:search™ for that very reason. We are the only search vendor to have a single search technology for desktop search, enterprise search, datacenter and Web search.

I know Exalead produces software for businesses and there is also Exalead the search engine. Can you please explain the differences/bridges between the two?

Of course. As mentioned earlier, all of our products are built on the same unified search technology platform, exalead one:search™. This means that the functionality is consistent across all products, even the Web. Whether you’re using exalead.com, our Web search engine, or exalead one:enterprise, our flagship enterprise solution, you will benefit from a single access point and our patented Search by Serendipity™ navigation technology. The concept is that Exalead will automatically return a list of related terms and categories based on the original query to allow users to zoom in or zoom out of a search and better interact with the results.

In terms of differences, the only major difference is that the exalead.com user interface is designed specifically for consumers and based on years of research and feedback. With that said, the look-and-feel is different from the enterprise products, but we offer full customization and options depending on customer needs and preferences.

What is BAAGZ™? What is the relationship between BAAGZ™ and Exalead?

Simply put, BAAGZ™ is the first service to bring together semantic search and social networking in a powerful, yet simple, consumer-friendly experience. At its core is an ultra-powerful Web search engine based on Exalead’s patented Semantic Web search technology. But it’s important to understand that BAAGZ is much more than a search engine. It is a new form of social network that represents the first live network of shared interests. These shared interests are characterized by the public content contained within individual folders, called baagz, that act as shortcuts to your favorite Web sites, articles, pictures, videos, RSS feeds and notes.

Tell us more about the concept of ‘search and social networking’?

Search is how we find information, so why not use it as a way to connect people with shared interests in a live network? So we’ve applied our expertise in search and user interfaces to the elements of sharing, personalization and social networking to allow people to use the Web as a place to find information and people with similar interests or goals, or are experts in a given subject.

Is any other alt search engine doing this (well)?

One may argue that Twine is based on a similar concept, but their focus is heavily biased towards the Semantic Web in a B2B context, whereas our focus is to provide a unified user experience for searching, bookmarking, organizing, sharing, discovering and connecting to people with shared interests, a totally different goal.

I like the idea of customizing my home page. So far I’ve done it on Google, though quite honestly, I don’t really use this feature. Can you please tell me how customizing my home page on Exalead is different from performing the same function on Google?

One of exalead.com’s key differentiators is that we offer a much richer visual experience. This is true for search results, with the use of thumbnails to help users quickly identify search results and narrow down information. This is also true for shortcuts on your home page. And as opposed to other old-fashioned customizable home pages, which are text-oriented, BAAGZ is meant to be used by everybody, not just the “geeks.”

Why the names BAAGZ™ and Exalead? Who came up with them and why?

The name BAAGZ is quite easy to explain. It is based on the notion that you can tell a lot about a person based on the content of their bag. This concept then applies to online information gathering and organizing things in bags, so it’s a somewhat literal translation. Exalead comes from ‘Exa,’ which is 1018 – in greek; + ‘lead,’ which of course means, ‘to guide.’

I love the graphic design of both Exalead and Baagz. Please tell me about the inspiration/source.

The “French Touch” I guess J More seriously, many of our designers are Apple-maniacs, and love the simplicity of Apple’s designs.

I noticed on your website that you have offices in five countries (two offices in U.S., one each in France, England, Germany and Italy). Do you consider your company global? If so, can you please elaborate on how you target your international markets and touch on the challenges of cultural sensitivity?

Definitely, and we’ve just opened our London office. In today’s market, it’s important to have a global footprint. End-users want to see examples of successful implementations in their own region, as well as successful implementations that were then extended to other regions or offices. This is an important factor for customers seeking information access solutions because most organizations need to index data in a variety of different languages, sometimes highly complex Asian and Arabic languages. This is where semantics and multilingual search capabilities come into play at a critical level.

Can you tell us about the Arabic search engine Tayait.com that is ‘powered by Exalead’?”

Tayait.com is one of our many customers that use our “application-neutral”
search infrastructure (namely, our exalead one:enterprise product) to power
their services (e-commerce search, classifieds search, yellow pages search,
web search, site search, database search, etc.). In the case of tayait.com,
they use our software to build a search service on Arabic web pages, using
advanced linguistics modules for handling Arabic in a much better way than
other consumer search engines, e.g., Google. That is the beauty of using a
high-end enterprise search platform for powering vertical search engines (or a
regional search engine, in this case).

Last week I spoke with Yakov Sadchikov of Quintura. His company’s mantra is that the next Google will come from Eastern Europe because there is so much talent there. What do you think about that? How will France/Western Europe rank?

In all honesty, it may come from just about anywhere. There is certainly a lot of talent in Europe, Eastern, or Western, as well as in Asia, the U.S., or elsewhere.

In a few sentences, can you please describe the key differentiating qualities of Exalead and why you see it as the search engine of the future?

Our key differentiators are our unified approach to search and the design of our user interface. We will continue to deliver to market new vertical search applications, building on our current offerings in image search, Wikipedia® search and video search.
 
Thank you for being a supporter of AltSearchEngines – what attracts you to our mission?

You’re quite welcome! We support your mission to recognize innovation from around the world and the vendors that are making a difference in how consumers search for information on the Web.

What is your business model?

For our exalead.com Web search engine, our business model is rooted in sponsored link advertisements. For our B2B business, it’s a more traditional license/maintenance business model.

Many thanks for your time, Francois. Happy Holidays!

Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.

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Did you miss Natalya’s interview last week with Yakov Sadchikov of Quintura? Just click here to see it.