[Sigia-l] Navigating through three dimensions

[Peter Merholz]

> I had visited Endeca's site sometime ago; it was surprisingly informative,
> well designed and organized .
>
> How does it perform in real life? Any concrete experiences?

I had a chat with them a few weeks ago. They showed me a lot of what they've
got going on, and it's *mighty* impressive.

Tower Records is their most obvious deployment

http://www.towerrecords.com/

If you click into "music," "classical," or "dvd", you can see they're all
run at endeca.com.

Tower has decided to base their entire navigation (on the left) with facets.

They've also got a promotions engine--none of the promotions in the middle,
or on the right, are hard-coded... They're all dynamically generated based
on rules.

Also, if you egregiously mistype, like I did in "music" with "Brittany
Speers" it corrects it automagically... And they claim it does so without
human intervention--it just keeps tweaking the query until it finds a match.

Anyway, it's a pretty damn smart system for a seemingly complete
search/browse/promote solution.

--peter