Back in October at our London Lucene Hackday Flax's Alan Woodward started to write Marple, a new open source tool for inspecting Lucene indexes. Since then we have made nearly 240 commits to the Marple GitHub repository, and are now happy to announce its first release.Continue reading
It won't have escaped your notice that factchecking is very much in the news recently due to last year's political upheavals in both the US and UK and the suspected influence of fake news on voters. Both traditional and social media organisations are making efforts in this area; examples include Channel 4 and Faceboo...Continue reading
Last week I attended Search Solutions, one of my favourite annual events where all aspects of search are covered from web to intranet to enterprise. The first speaker Sebastian Blohm from Microsoft spoke about a new personalised Clutter folder for email and how his team had first devel...Continue reading
Last week I spoke at the Big Data London conference, a very busy event with several thousand people attending. My session was on using open source search to make sense of Big Data - you can get slides here. In the evening we ran another Continue reading
After our two successful hackdays, it was on to the main event of the week and the largest open source search event of the year. In between catching up with other Lucene/Solr folks on the first day I enjoyed Chris 'Hossman' Hostetter's talk on Hidden Gems of Apache Sol...Continue reading
To mark Flax's 15th anniversary we ran two Lucene Hackdays recently, in London and Continue reading
During a recent client visit we encountered a common problem in search - over-application of 'boosts', which can be used to weight the influence of matches in one particular field. For example, you might sensibly use this to make results that match a query on their title field come higher in search results. However in this case we saw huge boost values used (numbers in the hundreds) which were probably swamping everything else - and it wasn't at all clear where the values had come from, be it ex...Continue reading
Quepid is an innovative tool from our partners Open Source Connections, which allows you to bridge the gap between content owners (who really know what's in your search index and how people might search for it) and search developers (who can tweak the search engine to improve relevance, given some examples of 'good' and 'bad' results for a query). We're increasingly using it in...Continue reading
We've just published a simple (60 lines of code) React.js component to npm which makes it easy to perform searches on a Solr 6 instance and get the data into the app to display. Unlike Twigkit or Searchkit this is not a UI library - it is just a connector. If you use it you will have to implement all the UI components yourself. ...Continue reading
Here at Flax, we're often called in to take a look at existing Apache Solr or Elasticsearch search applications, to suggest improvements, tune-ups or enhancements. It's impossible for us to know ahead of time what we might find - out-of-date versions of the software, slow performance on either (or both) the indexing or search side of the application ...Continue reading
