Use of Endeca in the Publishing industry
March 31, 2014

Use of Endeca in the Publishing industry

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

6.2 Publishing Workbench

Overall Satisfaction

Endeca is being used by one of our websites, which is a trade publication site dealing with the hospitality/meeting industry. It is used to power the editorial section as well as the buyers' guide section.

Pros

  • Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
  • Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
  • It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.

Cons

  • Dynamically-generated dimension values can be messy, hard to control.
  • Pipelines can get quite complicated very quickly unless the data is carefully organized beforehand.
  • Scalability may be an issue since I don't believe there's support for more than two MDEX servers for a particular index (I could be wrong about this, but this is what the config file implies).
  • There's no easy way to search multiple indices at once.
  • Our implementation was too small in size to speak of an ROI per se. However, given the benefits of the guided nav, it has generated more traffic for our site, and allow us to sell more premium listings.
Compared to Elasticsearch, Endeca has many out-of the box features that you'll have to code yourself if you're using Elasticsearch. Also, Endeca is a commercial-grade solution, Elasticsearch is still probably in the startup category, although they are gaining traction rapidly.
Price is a deterrent.
It's great for e-commerce with many useful out-of-the-box features. It is designed to help you boost your products so you can make money. However, for a non-e-commerce problem or for the case where you have multiple indeces that may need to be searched at once, I'd look elsewhere.

Comments

More Reviews of Endeca (discontinued)