Asking the right questions in a Search Audit

We’re often asked to review how our clients use search technology, both open and closed source (although we specialise in the former, we’ve also encountered most of the commercial search engines over the last 16 years). One common mistake is to assume that search is purely a technical problem, and that all issues can be resolved by writing software and changing configurations, or worse by throwing away the old engine and replacing it with a new one at huge expense. More

Building high-end search features at low cost with Apache Solr

One of the best things about the increased use of open source search technology is that features that were previously unattainable for clients with small budgets are now within reach. Our client Bride and Groom Direct, a UK-based business selling wedding gifts and stationery, asked us if we could help improve the search features on their website and in particular the auto-suggest - and they asked us to take a look at the website of US mega-reta...Continue reading

Tuning and improving elasticsearch for the Government Digital Service

The exciting GOV.UK project is getting close to its first release date of October 17th and we were asked by them to help with some search tuning as they migrate from Apache Solr to elasticsearch. Although elasticsearch has some great features there are still some areas where it lags Solr, such as the lack of spelling suggestion and proximity...Continue reading

Media monitoring with open source search – 20 times faster than before!

We're happy to announce we've just finished a successful project for a division of the Australian Associated Press to replace a closed source search engine with a considerably more powerful open source solution. You can read the press release here. As our client had a large investment in stored searches (which repr...Continue reading

Building bridges in the Cloud with open source search

We've just published a case study on our work for C Spencer Ltd., a UK-based civil engineering company who take a pro-active approach to document management - instead of taking the default Sharepoint route or buying another product off the shelf, they decided to create their own in-house system based on open source components, hosted on the Amazon AWS Cloud. We've helped them integrate Continue reading

Just the job for a recruitment client

We're pleased to announce our work with Reed Specialist Recruitment, one of the UK's largest recruitment companies, where we helped them implement an Apache Solr powered application to allow their 3000+ staff to search for and match candidates to jobs. We built an innovative indexing framework, a configuration tool and performance monitoring system for Reed and the system launched on time and under budget, a gr...Continue reading

Another powerful API based on Solr launches, searching more patents than Google

Our customer Cambridge Intellectual Property announced yesterday their new API for a collection of 55 million patents - 48 million more than Google Patents. It's great to see a Cambridge company innovating in this space, especially as the service is powered by Apache Solr (we've given them some small assistance with Continue reading