Now here is an intriguing way to possibly gain $500 or $1,000 for your library and at the same time interest library science students or perhaps even high school or undergraduates in search technology and information on the Web generally. Hakia has announced the following competition:

We invite librarians and information professionals to help us identify credible Web sites. By our definition, a credible Web site has accurate, current, and accessible information that fulfills most of these criteria:

• Peer review. The publisher of the site must have a peer review process or strict editorial controls to ensure the accuracy, dependability and merit of the published information. Most government institutions, academic journals, and news channels have such review mechanisms in place.

• No commercial bias. The publisher of the site shall have no commercial intent or bias. For example, for travel related recommendations consider U.S. Department of State travel portal and not Travelocity.

• Currency. The information on the site should be current and links should be working.

• Source authenticity. The publisher (preferably) should be the owner/producer of the content.

Here is the wording about prizes:

“Your credible site submissions will enter you to win prizes. Every month, hakia will give away the following thank-you prizes to 3 librarians:

$500 book donation to your library stacks (1 prize)

$1,000 conference grant (2 prizes)

The book prize will be awarded by a raffle. The conference grants will be awarded to participants with most URL submissions.”

Now, I know that cynics will scoff, “Great—Hakia gets huge numbers of hours of free labor and free data sifting.” But at least there is a search engine out there that is willing to try some innovative marketing. I imagine that there are some creative librarians in resource-poor areas who know some bright kids or who could partner with some social science or science teachers and get some kids interested in a Web project that would engage in them in close reading and analytical thinking and actually help to hone a search tool and in so doing perhaps help researchers and consumers find vital information that could improve lives. And if some kids won, they could help choose the books the prize money would pay for. Good for Hakia. I am tempted to try for the dough myself—maybe we could use the $1,000 to help lead a “Librarians in Search” conference. It would pay for a nice lunch, anyway.

Let’s hope that other search/Web 2.0 firms try to make Web surfing fun and worthwhile for cash-strapped libraries and other nonprofit institutions everywhere.

Exalead, a global leader of information access software for business and the web, today announced the industry’s most flexible and scalable enterprise platform designed specifically to overcome the new challenges facing the evolving complex search requirements of enterprises and high traffic consumer facing web sites.

But first this message from Exalead:

“84% of enterprises are unhappy with their enterprise information access solutions,” said Paul Doscher, US CEO of Exalead. “Analysts see that while the vast majority of information management activities today are focused on structured data sources – the future of information management will be the integration and analysis of heterogeneous, unstructured information sources.” Leveraging its 170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month – Exalead has a clear view of the emerging issues that face enterprise customers. Enterprises are finding enormous competitive advantages when they can expand their view into various data sources in a way that brings context and understanding.

This requires an information access platform that can scale and allows businesses the flexibility in customizing the solution for specific industries. “GEFCO was seeking a solution that would enable it to go a step further in the optimization and management of the logistics process. Exalead has dramatically improved system efficiency across the board,” explains Guillaume Rabier, Manager of Studies and Projects for GEFCO, one of Europe’s top ten transport and logistics groups. “We now have faster access to information, reliable data and more operational reporting tools, allowing our sales department and global management teams to make better informed decisions. This in turn, enables us to offer a better service to customers and to differentiate ourselves from competitors.” “We selected Exalead because it fulfills our need to make navigation around our internal and external sites as easy and efficient as possible. Compared with other offerings in the search market, Exalead is a cost effective, feature-rich choice,” said Douglas Campbell, eSearch Project Manager, the Scottish Government.

“We have partnered with Exalead because as our site has grown internationally and particularly in geographies such as Asia – we needed a site search partner who could scale with us,” said Chander Sarna, senior vice president of engineering, ops and product of Friendster. “Exalead was the perfect fit because they enable us to scale our site while using less hardware.”

Introducing Exalead’s CloudView Product Line Exalead’s new CloudView family of products will be available starting in the 4th quarter of 2008. The family of products includes CloudView OEM and CloudView Search. The family of products will evolve from the Exalead one:enterprise line with a new architecture designed to better adapt to growing scaling requirements needed in today’s enterprise. The key challenge in enterprise information access is that content exists locally on a variety of devices; behind the firewall with databases and legacy systems; and outside the firewall with partners, SaaS applications and on the Web.

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