The Guardian Selects Endeca for New Online Search Capabilities

LONDON ¡V November 29, 2005 ¡V Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation„µ, Search and Analysis solutions, announced today at Online Information 2005 (booth 328, Olympia Grand Hall, London) that Guardian Newspapers Limited has deployed a new Endeca-powered search engine on its website Guardian Unlimited (http://www.guardian.co.uk).

The new Endeca search solution replaces legacy search engine software and features next-generation capabilities not currently available on any other major news site.

The publisher unveiled the new search engine on the Guardian Unlimited front page in late October 2005, and plans to roll the new search out across the whole site by the end of the year. Guardian Unlimited is already seeing a significant increase in search activity on the site since the deployment of the Endeca solution.

In related news, Endeca today unveiled new Information Access Solutions for Media and Publishing designed to help online publishers, content providers and other information suppliers quickly deploy powerful retrieval capabilities for websites, customer and employee-facing content services and online directory applications.
(more available: http://endeca.com/about_endeca/press_releases/p_112905a.html)

¡§When looking at options for a new search experience, we were keen on exposing the full richness of the information available on the site and all other valuable content that Guardian Unlimited has to offer,¡¨ said Lloyd Shepherd, deputy director, digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers. ¡§Endeca¡¦s search and Guided Navigation capabilities quickly show everything available on a given topic, while offering visitors meaningful ways to explore and refine results by what¡¦s most desirable.¡¨

Popular online news publishers face increased competition from Web search engines like Google and Yahoo!, both as a primary source of news and information, as well as an attractive vehicle for advertisers. In facing this new challenge, two distinct strategies have emerged amongst high-profile news sites. Many sites offer the ability to toggle between searching site content or the Web content leveraging Google or Yahoo! for both, ceding user abandonment to capitalize on limited, shared keyword, pay-per-click ad revenue. In contrast, others, like the Guardian, have opted to take the challenge head-on, complementing their own brand equity, domain expertise, and depth of content with a compelling user experience to increase sessions, page views and overall ad and subscription revenue.

¡§We wanted to do something that the big web search engines wouldn¡¦t be able to do ¡V use the information in our content management system to make a browsable search experience,¡¨ added Shepherd. ¡§After all, what¡¦s the point of having our own search if it doesn¡¦t do a better job of searching our content than the big search engines already do?¡¨

Guardian Unlimited¡¦s new search engine offers visitors with a variety of ways take advantage of the site¡¦s content, combining cutting-edge search with unique new capabilities such as Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting. For example, a search for ¡§Sudoku¡¨ returns a list of 112 results from across the site ¡V including both articles and puzzles -- is flanked by navigation refinement options or ¡§filters¡¨ -- ¡§Section¡¨ (Guardian, Media, Observer, Sport, Politics, etc.), ¡§Publication Year¡¨, and ¡§Publication¡¨ (The Guardian, Guardian Unlimited, The Observer) and is topped with a spotlighted editor¡¦s recommendation for a downloadable PDF of ¡§The Daily Sudoku¡¨.

About Endeca
Endeca¡¦s award-winning Guided Navigation, Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca¡¦s customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Tesco, Comet, Littlewoods, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, CompUSA); financial services (Bank of America); manufacturing and distribution (IBM and John Deere); media and publishing (World Book) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.

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Endeca and Guided Navigation are registered trademarks, and Content Spotlighting is a trademark of Endeca Technologies, Inc. All other product and service names mentioned herein are or may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies or organizations.

Contacts:
In UK - Paul Calderwood
Kingswood Public Relations
020 8763 2241
kingswoodmktg@btinternet.com

In USA - Craig VerColen
Endeca
617-577-7999
cvercolen@endeca.com

Donna Murno
Racepoint Group, Inc.
1-781-487-4612
dmurno@racepointgroup.com