Next week Lucene/Solr Revolution is to be held in San Diego, with a couple of days of training on April 29th & 30th and the main event on the 1st and 2nd May. This is probably the biggest event dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr and features a huge array of presentations from Etsy, Wells Fargo, Lucidworks and even Microsoft who are increasingly supporting open source technologies.

Enterprise Search Europe is next on 15th and 16th May with a day of workshops on the 14th, including one from the Flax team. I’m looking forward to the various open source panels and presentations of course, and hearing from people from Ernst & Young, Neilsen Norman Group, Oracle and the University of Manchester. We’re also running a Meetup event on the first evening, open to all, with the usual informal mix of beer, snacks and search!

Some of the Flax team are hoping to attend Berlin Buzzwords on June 3rd & 4th – this conference promises to address “search”, “store” and “scale” – certainly sounds interesting! We know there will be lots of talks on elasticsearch and Lucene/Solr.

There’s more to come in the Autumn of course – more details when we know them. Hope to meet you at one of these great events!

Luckily there are events that don’t work like this – the excellent Search Solutions day run in late Autumn by the British Computer Society and of course Enterprise Search Europe (disclaimer: I’m on the programme committee for the latter). My view is this means we get a higher quality set of talks, presenters who know and can discuss their subject rather than just reading out the company-approved Powerpoint deck, and attendees can see a wider range of views and options.

Using Apache Solr and in under two days we built them a similar feature for their website: since we didn’t have direct access to their development servers we provided both Solr configuration files and a simple JQuery/Javascript demo of the features they needed (it’s about 170 lines of code). Their own developers then integrated these changes based on our notes. I think it’s safe to say that Bride and Groom Direct are a rather smaller business than Sears, but with open source they can have access to equally good search facilities. They’ve been kind enough to let us feature them on our Clients page and as you can see, they’re happy with the results.

Our second talk was from Shane Evans, who I first met when he led software development for our client Mydeco. While there he first worked on the development of an open source Python crawling framework, Scrapy: Shane showed how easy it is to get a Scrapy web spider running in a few lines of code, and how extensible and customisable Scrapy is for a huge variety of crawling and scraping situations. There’s even a fully hosted version at Scrapinghub with graphical tools for setting up web crawling and page scraping. We’re big fans of Scrapy at Flax and we’ve used it in a number of projects, so it was good to see an overview of why Scrapy exists and how it can be used.

Thanks to both our speakers who both travelled from out of town as did several other attendees: we’re pleased to say this was our 15th Meetup and we now have 100 members – we’re already planning further events, one will be on the evening of the first day of the Enterprise Search Europe conference.

The speakers were both there to talk about their recent books: prolific author Martin White of Intranet Focus has written a book on Enterprise Search with the strapline ‘Enhancing Business Performance’. Martin has decades of experience in the sector, an enviable collection of war stories from inside the enterprise and was as ever an engaging speaker.

Next up were Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate to talk about their new book which focuses on the user experience of search. ‘Designing the Search Experience’ promises to be a rich resource on how, why and where people use search and how this impacts the design of user interfaces.

The evening ended with some lively discussion and a promise that after its long absence this Meetup will now be happening on a more regular basis. We’re also running our own Cambridge search meetup – the next event is on February 21st where we’ll be hearing about web crawling and scraping. Another date for your diary is the Enterprise Search Europe conference on May 15th & 16th this year – the programme has just been published and features speakers from Ernst & Young and Oracle. I’ll also be running a workshop the day before the conference on Getting the Best from Open Source Search.

Questions from the floor (and via Twitter) showed that many outside the technical sector (and probably a few within it) are still bemused at how one can build a thriving business on open source, when the panel admitted that it can involve making your intellectual property available to your competitors, giving your product away for nothing and investing heavily in community building. One of the most interesting responses from the panel indicated that an open source entrant to an existing market can shrink that market by 40-50% – a venture capitalist I spoke to afterwards couldn’t understand why this can be a positive thing: however if a market is dominated by big players selling overpriced solutions, some disruptive deflation can re-shape the market considerably: this is certainly what we’ve seen in the search sector recently, and investment in the right place and time can still reap considerable rewards (consider Elasticsearch’s recent funding).

The panel also made the point that a key part of open source success is investment in people – both within a business and in the wider community. Another question about what an open source business is actually selling prompted a range of answers: a brand, peach of mind, happiness, experience, platform were the answers given. It was clear that the discussion could have continued for a lot longer as the audience were keen to hear more, and the BLN may thus be running further open source themed events – the appetite for knowledge about open source business models outside the technical community is large.

Thanks to Mark Littlewood for organising such an interesting evening and particular thanks for the free Raspberry Pi – we have a cunning plan about what to do with it so watch this space!

• Elasticsearch contains (by some measures) 64 years of effort, Solr only 55 years….a point to Elasticsearch!
• Elasticsearch commits are 31% down on last year, Solr commits are 85% up…a point to Solr!
• There are more books about Solr than Elasticsearch…a point to Solr!
• Elasticsearch, sorry elasticsearch, has a cool lower case logo and fancy website…a point to Elasticsearch!

This is of course before we get to any actual technical differences in terms of performance, scalability, ease-of-use etc. which are probably a lot more important than the list above. There are vocal critics and supporters of each project on Twitter and other media, but the great thing in our view is that there is a choice of two such excellent search technologies, both open source, so for real world applications one can try both at little cost and choose whichever is most appropriate (there are even proven migration routes between the two – we’ve helped one client with this process).

Here in the slightly calmer waters of open source search, we’ve seen a huge rise in enquiries from often blue-chip companies, no longer needing persuasion that open source is a serious contender for even the largest search and content projects. Often these companies have considered large commercial solutions but are put off by both the price and high-pressure marketing tactics – in a world of reduced budgets you simply can’t sell magic beans for a pile of gold. We’ve also seen increased interest in related technologies such as machine learning and automatic categorisation – search really isn’t just about search any more.

At Flax we’re busier than we have ever been and we’re expected the trend to continue. We’re looking forward to running more Cambridge Search Meetups, visiting and helping organise conferences such as Enterprise Search Europe and Lucene Revolution, building our network of carefully chosen partners and of course working on exciting and cutting-edge development projects.

As the storms in our sector continue to rage overhead we’ll simply be getting on with what we do best, building effective search.

Migrating a search engine from one technology to another is rarely trouble-free: data must be re-indexed, query architectures rewritten, integration with external systems re-done, relevancy checked…however with sufficient forethought it can be done successfully. We’ve just helped one client migrate from a commercial engine to Apache Solr in a matter of weeks: although at first glance Solr didn’t seem to support all of the features the commercial engine provided, it proved possible to simulate them using multiple queries and with careful design for scalability, query performance is comparable.

Choosing one closed source engine to replace another doesn’t remove the risk that future corporate mergers & acquisitions will cause exactly the same lack of confidence that is no doubt affecting Autonomy customers – or huge increases in license fees, a drop in the quality of available support or the end of the product line altogether – and we’ve heard of all of these effects over the last few years. Moving to an open source search engine gives you freedom and control of the future of the technology your business is reliant upon, with a wealth of options for migration assistance, development and support.

So here’s our offer – we’d be happy to talk, for free (by phone or face-to-face for customers within reach of our Cambridge offices), to any Autonomy customers considering migration and to help them consider the open source options (some of these even have the Bayesian, probabilistic search features Autonomy IDOL provides) – and together with our partners we can also provide a level of ongoing support comparable to any closed source vendor. We don’t have salespeople, we don’t have a product to sell you and you’ll be talking directly to experts with decades of experience implementing search – and there’s no obligation to take things any further. We’d simply like to offer an alternative (and we believe, safer) route to effective search.

Milad Shokouhi of Microsoft Research started us off showing us how he’s worked on query trend analysis for Bing: he showed us how some queries are regular, some spike and go and some spike and remain – and how these trends can be modelled in various ways. Alex Jaimes of Yahoo! Barcelona talked about a human centred approach to search – I agree with his assertion that “we’re great at adapting to bad technology” – still sadly true for many search interfaces! Some of the demographic approaches have led to projects such as Yahoo! Clues which is worth a look.

Martin White of Intranet Focus was up next with some analysis of recent surveys and research, leading to some rather doom-laden conclusions about just how few companies are investing sufficiently in search. Again some great quotes: “Information Architects think they’ve failed if users still need a search engine” and a plea for search vendors (and open source exponents) to come clean about what search can and can’t do. Emma Bayne of the National Archives was next with a description of their new Discovery catalogue, a similar presentation to the one she gave earlier in the year at Enterprise Search Europe. Kristian Norling of Findwise finished with a laconic and amusing treatment of the results from Findwise’s survey on enterprise search – indicating that those who produce systems that users are “very satisfied” usually do the same things, such as regular user testing and employing a specialist internal search team.

Stella Dextre Clark talked next about a new ISO standard for thesauri, taxonomies and their interopability with other vocabularies – some great points on the need for thesauri to break down language barriers, help retrieval in enterprise situations where techniques such as PageRank aren’t so useful and to access data from decades past. Leo Sauermann was next with what was my personal favourite presentation of the day, about a project to develop a truly semantic search engine both for KDE Linux and currently the Cloud. This system, if more widely adopted, promises a true revolution in search, as relationships between data objects are stored directly by the underlying operating system. I spoke next about our Clade taxonomy/classification system and our Flax Media Monitor, which I hope was interesting.

Nicholas Kemp of DSTL was up next exploring how they research new technologies and approaches which might be of interest to the defence sector, followed by Richard Morgan of Funnelback on how to empower intranet searchers with ways to improve relevance. He showed how Funnelback’s own intranet allows users to adjust multiple factors that affect relevance – of course it’s debatable how these may be best applied to customer situations.

The day ended with a ‘fishbowl’ discussion during which a major topic was of course the Autonomy/HP debacle – there seemed to be a collective sense of relief that perhaps now marketing and hype wouldn’t dominate the search market as much as it had previously…but perhaps also that’s just my wishful thinking! All in all this was as ever an interesting and fun day and my thanks to the IRSG organisers for inviting me to speak. Most of the presentations should be available online soon.