History
A good way to understand the uses of CeleriQ.NET is to understand its history. Like many software creations it was borne out of necessity. While working for a large company that building listing websites, I came into contact with products that were designed to flatten data and allow very fast searching. This is needed for high-traffic websites. Many products used were unbelievably expensive. Many range from the six to seven figures per year per server! That is not a typo. At first I did not "get it". These products seems to be a regression from the great relational SQL technology on which I had been raised. To make matters worse they were dreadfully expensive. It took some time but I "got it". They were not meant to be pretty to SQL programmers. They were meant to rip through a fixed dataset and deliver results for web pages very fast. They did this; however I had some other issues with them. First was price and secondly scope. The price was just too high for all but a very few large companies. This is why you see a lot of mom and pop listing sites with ugly and unusable websites. More importantly I found the products on the market to be overkill for a listing site. If you have a SQL Server database with your data in it, you do not need a half-million dollar product that can index a quarter of a million XML files. This revelation is akin to the fact that most people use only 5-10% of Microsoft Excel's features. For most people Excel is overkill, they just need a grid that can crunch a few formulas, but you pay hundreds of dollars for features you never use and do not even know exist.
I actually saw this at the company I once worked. They listed items on the internet grouped by city, state, features, dealers, etc. All of this information was in a database. There was no external data sources, or XML files, or data feeds, or AS400 integrations, etc. It was just a SQL database with data they wanted to list on the Internet. I got the feeling that they overpaid a bit.
When I confronted my manager and showed some of the workings of the CeleriQ technology (very similar to the product they purchased), he seemed less than enthusiastic. I thought for a minute and asked him, "Would someone loose his job if we changed listing products?" His answer was "Yes." I promptly closed my laptop, said "Thank you", and left his office. I knew that was a dead-end. Somebody has staked his career on that path and little old me was not going to get in the way, cost be damned. I know when to shut-up. I never brought it up again.
Uses
CeleriQ.NET gives you the ability to create a structured data schema based on your SQL data. It then gives you the ability to create a strongly-typed API for use in Visual Studio.NET. It provides out of the box Piloted Search, which allows your site users to determine how they want to search. There is no need to build artificial canned paths that they may not like and takes up developer time. Users can allow search by geocode, which is a cryptic way of saying city, state, zip, location, etc. Keyword searching is built-in as well. Add a search box to your site and add a couple lines of code to have text searching.
What this technology is god for can be defined easily. Categorizing and listing objects in a way that helps users find what they are looking for. Starting with a lot of data, users can filter down results to a useful list. People can look at tens of objects not tens of thousands. By categorizing, I mean tagging objects with a sort of meta-data that makes finding and organizing information simple from a human perspective.
