Over the years we've dealt with quite a few migration projects where the query syntax of the client's existing search engine must be preserved. This might be because other systems (or users) depend on it, or a large number of stored expressions exist and it is difficult or uneconomic to translate them all by hand. Our usual approach is to write a query parser, which understands the current syntax but creates a Continue reading
Category Archives: Blog
Can you make a contribution to Apache Solr core development?
As any regular reader of this blog will be aware, we use almost exclusively open source software on customer projects. To meet their requirements, we often have to extend the functionality of the software (e.g. XJOIN in Solr). As far as possible, with the agreement of the customer, we like to then contribute these changes b...Continue reading
Running out of disk space with Elasticsearch and Solr: a solution
We recently did a proof-of-concept project for a customer which ingested log events from various sources into a Kafka - Logstash - Elasticsearch - Kibana stack. This was configured with Ansible and hosted on about a dozen VMs inside the customer's main...Continue reading
Measuring search relevance scores
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
Apache Kafka London Meetup – Real time search and insights
The rise of Apache Kafka as a streaming data solution is something we've been watching for a while - as part of a collection of Big Data tools, it provides a 'TiVo for data' feature. We've begun to use it in client projects covering both search and log analysis...Continue reading
Developing ongoing search tuning processes
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
Flax wins contract with NHS Wales to support Apache Solr for Welsh Clinical Portal
We're very pleased to announce that Flax has won a 3-year contract with the NHS Wales Informatics Service to support the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine used by the Welsh Clinical Portal, during which period we'll be backing up the in-house team with our deep experience of Solr. The Welsh Clinical Portal is a classic example of how a search engine ...Continue reading
Auditing your site search performance
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
Flax announces partnership with Apache Kafka creators Confluent
We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading
A suggested approach to running a Site Search Tuning Workshop
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search: