CAMBRIDGE, Mass., February 13, 2006 -- Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation®, Search and Analysis solutions, announced today that Cox Newspapers, Inc. has selected Endeca's platform to power numerous applications across its many popular news properties. Starting with its largest paper and site, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Cox Newspapers will begin to use Endeca's solutions to offer cutting-edge capabilities on popular, high value services, such as shopping, jobs, real estate, automotive, and more. The new Endeca-powered services, which will debut later this spring on the AJC.com site, will be rolled out to other Cox Newspapers sites in the coming months.
The deal follows Endeca's recent agreement with leading British publisher Guardian Newspapers, and Endeca's official unveiling of new Information Access Solutions for Media & Publishing, both announced in late-November 2005.
While the debate in news publishing continues over the right balance of free content vs. premium content, services like classifieds and job listings have proven themselves as extremely popular, revenue-generating vehicles and perfect cross-medium complements. Publishers, facing competition from other regional dailies and Internet pure-plays, are increasingly looking for ways to enhance these high-value services.
"Services like shopping, job listings, autos and other classified verticals are incredibly important to both our visitors and our business," said Leon Levitt, VP/Digital Media, at Cox Newspapers. "Our ability to consistently deliver a superior user experience is a critical component in attracting readers, buyers and sellers, alike. Endeca gives us the flexible platform which we can use to quickly and consistently deliver this superior experience, where it's needed most."
Endeca's next-generation search and information access solutions help users search, browse and compare listings and information by all of the desirable and required criteria that is available. For example, a job seeker, looking for an opportunity in finance types "junior accountant" into a search box. With a traditional search engine they would be forced to manually sift through a long list -- in many cases multiple pages -- of all the job listings that mentioned "junior accountant." Frustrated, the job seeker begins to add more keywords, such as location, salary, etc., hoping to trim the list down. But now, the engine returns only a "no results found" message. With Endeca, the original search returns a list of all the jobs, and offers a variety of ways to hone in on only the most desirable by exposing related criteria. For example, key criteria such as location, salary, years of experience, hours, employer, benefits, etc. -- all derived directly from the listings themselves -- are now exposed as valid refinement options. So rather than having to guess the perfect query, the system simply guides the user through the process, always exposing and offering valid next steps.
"Successful regional daily publishers like Cox have incredible advantages over pure play Internet services, including regional awareness, cross-medium exposure and brand credibility. The key is converting these advantages into revenue opportunities," said Steve Papa, founder and chairman of Endeca. "By investing in the user experience -- in the places it matters most -- publishers are seeing remarkable returns that impact both top and bottom line goals."
About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise 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 (Barnes & Noble, The Home
Depot, Wal-Mart); financial services (Bank of America, MFS
Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and
distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, and John Deere); media and
publishing (World Book and IHS) 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.
About Cox Newspapers
As one of the nation's largest newspaper publishing enterprises,
Cox Newspapers now produces 17 daily and 25 weekly newspapers. The
company also operates direct mail businesses, distributes
classified advertising publications, customized newsletters and
owns one-third of a newsprint manufacturing business. Total
circulation for the company's newspapers reaches 1.2 million each
weekday and more than 1.6 million on Sundays.
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