Category Archives: Sectors

Elasticsearch Percolator & Luwak: a performance comparison of streamed search implementations

Posted on by
2

Most search applications work by indexing a relatively stable collection of documents and then allowing users to perform ad-hoc searches to retrieve relevant documents. However, in some cases it is useful to turn this model on its head, and match individual documents against a collection of saved queries. I shall refer to this model as "streamed search". One example of streamed search is in media monitoring. The monitoring agency's ...Continue reading

BioSolr at BOSC 2015 – open source search for bioinformatics

Posted on by
Reply

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

BioSolr begins with a workshop day

Posted on by
Reply

Last Thursday we attended a workshop day at the European Bioinformatics Institute as part of our joint BioSolr project. This was an opportunity for us to give some talks on particular aspects of Apache Lucene/Solr and hear from the various teams there on how they are using the software. The workshop was oversubscri...Continue reading

BioSolr – building better search for bioinformatics

Posted on by
1

The entire Flax technical team spent the day at the European Bioinformatics Institute yesterday discussing an exciting new project we'll begin this coming September, BioSolr. Funded by the BBSRC this collaboration between Flax and the EBI aims “to significantly advance the state of the art with regard to indexing and querying biomedical data with freely available open source software”. Continue reading

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
3

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!

Posted on by
2

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

Better search for e-petitions – handling misspelled content with a Solr phonetic filter

Posted on by
2

We recently overhauled the search functionality for the UK government's e-petitions site, run by the Government Digital Service, a new team within the Cabinet Office. Search has an important function on the site; users are forced to search for existing petitions which cover their area of concern before creating a new one. This cuts down on the number of near-duplicate petitions, and makes petitions ...Continue reading

An open source replacement for the dtSearch closed source search engine

Posted on by
6

We've been working on a client project where we needed to replace the dtSearch closed source search engine, which doesn't perform that well at scale in this case. As the client has significant investment in stored queries (it's for a monitoring application) they were keen that the new engine spoke exactly the same query language as the old - so we've built a version of Apache Lucene to replace dtSearch. There are a ...Continue reading