Endeca, a provider of Guided Navigation, Search, and Analysis solutions, has announced that Ace Hardware has selected the Endeca ProFind search and navigation platform designed to help store employees find and order products from across the hardware chain's collective, nationwide inventory. The new software will be used to search and browse Ace Hardware's ACENET, a company-wide, employee-facing extranet that connects more than 4,700 individual stores. ACENET represents Ace Hardware's initial search project using the Endeca platform. To better serve its customers Ace's IT team created ACENET, a Web -based system that is designed to give employees access and order products, regardless of location.

Used on Web sites, intranets, extranets, and within enterprises, Endeca ProFind is a next-generation information retrieval platform that combines an advanced search with Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities designed to help people find the information most relevant to their needs. Endeca's approach to information retrieval mimics the human discovery process by integrating the two most common means of finding information online -- searching and browsing - allowing people to continually adapt and hone their search based on their own determination of relevancy. This combination intends to give organizations the tools to maximize the value of internal and external information, regardless of source, structure, or file type.

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