Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

Research Report

Beyond Search:

What to do whenYour Enterprise SearchSystem Doesn't Work

April 2, 2008by Stephen E. Arnold

Beyond Search: Intelligenx

12. Intelligenx

www.intelligenx.com

Intelligenx is one of those companies with solid technology which is off the radar. But it was Intelligenx’s Discovery Engine that was the secret ingredient for the Carlyle Group when it sold Dex Media to R H. Donnelley Corporation for $9.4 billion. Searchtechnology from Intelligenx also substantively changed how the Office of AIDSResearch manages and administers research grants at U.S. NIH. And it was theirDiscovery Engine that helped to transform the way in which D&B licenses data tolibraries around the country.Iqbal Talib, his son, and a cadre of skilled engineers have built technology that permitsusers to search and interact with incredibly complex datasets. The core productoffering, Discovery Engine is unique in that it was built ground-up to enable full-textsearch with categorizations. The display of intuitive refinements (with counts) that arederived from the structure in data helps users to find and ‘discover’ information.

ItemQuick Facts

Product Intelligenx Discovery EnginePrice Starts at $50,000. Custom price quote required.Key Feature Full-text search with categorizations.PurposeProvide access to structured information, so that users can interact anddiscover Clients Publicar, Axesa, MediaTel, OAR at NIH, TDS, ilocal, D&B, WebVisibleCompany Privately-heldContact +1-703-793-3270

Table 26: Quick Look at Intelligenx

Mr. Talib told

Beyond Search

, “Our Company was one of the first to introduce acombined full-text search coupled with navigation. What we discovered was that thereare far more effective ways to let users interact with information. We also found that wecould engineer systems to deliver unprecedented search features and functionalities atfar lower costs and without many of the challenges and bottlenecks associated withother conventional search methods.” The son, Zubair Talib, is the CTO. He attendedMIT and, with some friends from school, developed the first algorithms that are still thefoundation of Discovery Engine.The Carlyle Group purchased Denver, CO-based Dex Media for $7.05B. Over the next26 months, Dex launched a new Internet strategy that harnessed the power of Discovery Engine. On DexOnline, users could conduct a Google-like full-text search andfor the first time anywhere, they could search all the text from all of Dex Media’s printdirectories. Users could refine the search results in order to find (or

discover

) what they were looking for. The site was responsive and users took to the interactive search

Beyond Search: Intelligenx

functionality. During the time Carlyle owned Dex Media, usage of DexOnlineskyrocketed (10-fold increase in traffic) propelling Dex from Internet obscurity to thenumber 1 traffic position within its 13 state region, ahead of Google Local, Yahoo Local,and Switchboard.Since Dex, Intelligenx has won a number of highly competitive contracts with largedirectory publishers around the world who use Discovery Engine to provide interactiveaccess to yellow page information over the Internet. Mr. Talib said,

We had success with directory publishers because our technology caneasily handle very large traffic volumes, large data sets, and complex business logic. Directory publishers also face challenges with how tomonetize their traffic and how to scale their business models – a problemthat Discovery Engine solves quite naturally.

The company’s system allows you to search content from a print yellow page ad(including brands, locations and hours of operation, for instance), including thestandard name, address, and category fields. A user does not have to specify whichfields to query. Each result set is then presented in “buckets,” or collections of on-targetresults, not a list of results. You can then refine or “drill down” into these buckets tofind particular listings quickly and intuitively. The suggestion of results that may berelated to the initial query allows you to discover information that they may not haveknown even existed.

Figure 42: Intelligenx Discovery Engine

The Discovery Engine includes separate APIs: one for indexing, one for acquiring content, and one for data transformation. The system can be integrated into almost any enterpriseenvironment.