Out and about in search & monitoring – Autumn 2015

It's been a very busy few months for events - so busy that it's quite a relief to be back in the office! Back in late November I travelled to Vienna to speak at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress with our client Infomedia about how we've helped them to migrate their media monitoring platform from the elderly, unsupported and hard to scale Continue reading

Elasticon London 2015 – more products, more scale, more users!

Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic. Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...Continue reading

Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 2

Not such an early start for me for Day 2 (I'd been up pretty late running the Meetup the night before) but I did manage to catch the very end of Findwise's presentation on their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. This is a unique and valuable benchmark of the state of enterprise search - I urge you to read it, if for no oth...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 1

This year's Enterprise Search Europe started early for me - I had been invited to give the opening keynote, so I made sure I arrived early enough to make sure my laptop would play nicely with the projector, always a worry! The keynote was well recieved and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about Continue reading

Open source search events roundup for late 2015

Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading

BioSolr at BOSC 2015 – open source search for bioinformatics

Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading

Innovations in Knowledge Organisation, Singapore: a review

I'm just back from Singapore: my first visit to this amazing, dynamic and everchanging city-state, at the kind invitation of Patrick Lambe, to speak at the first Innovations in Knowledge Organisation conference. I think this was probably one of the best organised and most interesting events I've attended in the last few years. The event started with an enthusiastic ...Continue reading

Going international – open source search in London, Berlin & Singapore

We're travelling a bit over the next few weeks to visit and speak at various events. This weekend Alan Woodward is at Berlin Buzzwords, a hacker-focused conference with a programme full of search talks. He's not speaking this year, but if you want to talk about Lucene, Solr or our own Luwak stored search library and the Continue reading

IntraTeam 2015 – a brief visit

Last week I dropped in on the IntraTeam 2015 conference in Copenhagen, an event focused on intranets with some content on enterprise search. After a rather pleasant evening of Thai food and networking I attended the last day of the event. The keynote speaker was Dave Snowden, who has an amusing and rather curmudgeonly style of presentation, making sure to note the previous presenters he'd disagreed with for their over-reliance on simplistic concepts of k...Continue reading