Oracle Endeca - Your guided search.. amplified!
April 04, 2014
Oracle Endeca - Your guided search.. amplified!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
OEC 3.1.2
Overall Satisfaction
We work in the Professional Services Industry and use Oracle Endeca to develop eCommerce and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for our customers during our consulting engagements. We also use the tool internally for searching and navigation of our document base as well as other analytical operations across the whole organization.
Oracle Endeca Commerce offers a strong, and very competitive, Advanced Enterprise search platform. at it's core, addresses pain points related to data discovery and customer experience management. It is - by far - the best of it's breed w.r.t. search and navigation capabilities enabling people to get to what they are looking for pretty easily and quickly. It does have a sophisticated configuration model that gives power to the Business to manage dynamic customer interaction through merchandising capabilities in a cross-platform/cross-channel environment (web, mobile, other...).
Oracle Endeca Commerce offers a strong, and very competitive, Advanced Enterprise search platform. at it's core, addresses pain points related to data discovery and customer experience management. It is - by far - the best of it's breed w.r.t. search and navigation capabilities enabling people to get to what they are looking for pretty easily and quickly. It does have a sophisticated configuration model that gives power to the Business to manage dynamic customer interaction through merchandising capabilities in a cross-platform/cross-channel environment (web, mobile, other...).
- High performance search and navigation queries compared to normal database systems. One of the key factors contributing to that is the Endeca flat record structure stored in a data graph format that allows for faceted navigation of records. What is called "Guided Navigation".
- Fully interactive customer experience through Endeca Experience Manager tool. This tool provides merchandising capabilities which allow for the development of customized experiences based on the current web page being visited, search keywords, user segment, date time (start and/or end) faceted navigation state or a combination of all of these. Experience Manager also allows for content - or product - spotlighting as well as other capabilities of boosting certain search results to the top of the list or bury them at the end. And many other features.
- The Oracle Endeca Assembler API allows for the ability to centralize all business logic and connecting to third party systems to consolidate search results, navigation options, CMS content, RSS feeds and pretty much anything you can think of into one unified response (JSON or XML) to any system or channel in the platform.
- Auto-correct and "Did you mean" features are fabulous. Oracle Endeca provides a sophisticated configuration model that enables the team to tune the various thresholds for these features which allows for a tailored behavior to each industry or context.
- One of the very competitive features of Oracle Endeca is that it enables business teams to choose the appropriate relevance of the search results being displayed. The team can tweak - resort or reorder - search results to show the desired list for the users. This is also possible for faceted navigation options!
- The unique "Guided Navigation" feature in Oracle Endeca ONLY shows relevant/applicable refinement options to the user at any given context or navigation state. Which minimizes - a lot of times eliminates - the likelihood of 'no results'.
- Handling no results scenarios through Search tuning capabilities in Oracle Endeca.
- Preview capabilities for content within Experience Manager without affecting the live production environment.
- Type-ahead suggestions is a very strong feature of Endeca as it provides light-weight responses with relevant options to users as they type.
- Ability to connect to almost any data source with minimal effort. Documents, file systems, databases, text files, delimited files, web site crawling etc.
- The workbench business tool may have it's glitches at times when trying to open content or save content. A refresh or login/logout usually fixes it.
- Effort is required to integrate Endeca into any web application or platform since it provides XML or JSON that would still need to be consumed and worked with. Generally it is best to create object models in your application to read in these responses and work with them.
- It is not possible to update records or taxonomy in Oracle Endeca Commerce on the fly. A baseline update process - or partial update process - has to run to update records before any changes can appear on the web application or front-end. The time it takes for this update to finish is highly dependent on the number of records in your data set (thousands vs. millions) and the amount/nature of ETL transformations you have setup in Endeca's Pipeline.
- Although Endeca provides the partial update process - which allows for incremental updates to the data through out the day - the frequency of these partial updates is highly dependent on how long that update takes. The main reason is because it is not possible to run more than one update simultaneously.
- Oracle Endeca has demonstrated a noticeable ability to increase conversion rates and great eCommerce experiences.
- Solr,Google Enterprise Search
Endeca is at the same level with largest enterprise search providers. However, it does surpass them in the ability to fine tune and customize search configuration.