Overview: Endeca
Endeca is the leader in eCommerce applications, although the technology is also deployed and running smoothly in all sorts of government and enterprises around the world in more traditional enterprise search applications.
Endeca pioneered the re-ranking of results based on business rules, vs. the traditional fulltext search engines' use of textual and link based relevance. This meant that the organic results order, that returned by the core engine, could be slightly modified to, for example, move more profitable items up in the list. They also created interfaces for business users, vs. IT administrators, so that somewhat non-technical managers could add these new rules to the search engine. This type of innovation earned them early market traction in the eCommerce space, and spot in Gartner's top right "magic quadrant".
Endeca has not stood still and has continued to innovate. Virtually all of their customers utilize faceted search in their results list, allowing site visitors to drill down on various product categories such as manufacturer, price range, material, etc. They have also created additional GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for letting developers create detailed data handling, extraction and validation during document indexing. This allows Meta Data from various sources to be remapped into consistent field names and values.
Not content to be king of the eCommerce space, Endeca has also stressed their prowess in serving the Enterprise space. They won an award in 2007 for their advanced management interface; we're always glad to see companies focus on that area. Though they may be quite capable in the enterprise software arena, we continue to see them mentioned most often in the context of eCommerce.
Other vendors have certainly noticed Endeca's success. FAST Search created their ImPulse eCommerce solution, which was likely a direct response to Endeca. IBM also includes search capabilities in their eCommerce platform, though they don't seem to market the search aspect separately these days. Dieselpoint has launched their Open Pipeline initiative, to allow outside developers to further evolve document processing techniques; this maybe have been more in response to FAST's pipeline or Ultraseek's patches.py, but in any case it means many vendors are talking about improving document handling and data extraction / normalization. Google has also made inroads into the eCommerce space. Oddly Autonomy does not seem to have responded directly to Endeca on the eCommerce front, instead focusing on eDiscovery and compliance, along with classic enterprise search.