A review of Stephen Arnold’s CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access

Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading

Searching for opportunities in Real-Time Analytics

I spent a day last week at a new event from UNICOM, a conference on Real-Time Analytics. Mike Ferguson chaired the event and was kind enough to spend time with me over lunch exploring how search software might fit into the mix, something that has been on my mind since hearing about the Unified Log<...Continue reading

Cambridge Search Meetup – Elasticsearch Hackday

Last Friday we hosted a hackday featuring Elasticsearch in Cambridge, following a similar event last year focused on Apache Lucene/Solr. Around 20 people attended from organisations working in sectors including analytics, digital music, bioinformatics and e-commerce, and all the Flax team were there as well. We started wi...Continue reading

London Elasticsearch User Group – September Meetup

Last night I joined a good-sized crowd at a venue on Hoxton Square for some talks on Elasticsearch - this Meetup group is very popular and always attracts a good proportion of people new to the world of search, as well as some familiar faces. I started with a quick announcement of our own Elasticsearch hackday in a few weeks ti...Continue reading

Analysts getting a bad press – how can they do better?

It seems to be a bad summer for analyst companies in several sectors: here's Forrester getting a kicking from Digital Clarity Group about their Wave report on Digital Experience Delivery Platforms (my first challenge was understanding what on earth those are, but I think it's a new shiny name for web content management), Nuix Continue reading

Why we won’t pay to play at conferences

One unedifying result of having been asked to speak on open source search at various events and conferences over the last few years is the discovery that not all events are equal - some genuinely wish to create a programme of interesting talks of value to the audience, and some simply wish to sell as much sponsorship as possible to those who would like to present. Some of the larger analyst firms are guilty of this behaviour - their Summits and Forums are often packed with talks by big-budget so...Continue reading

The death of enterprise search is reported, again

There's no doubt that the search market has been in turmoil for many months now: traditional, closed source vendors are either frantically repositioning to avoid the 'juggernaut that is Apache's Solr/Lucene project' or attempting to bore customers to death with Powerpoint. Our sources tell us that in the UK at...Continue reading

An open day on open source search from Sirius & Flax

We spent Friday at the riverside offices of Sirius Corporation, our support partners, for the first and hopefully not the last of their Open Days on open source enterprise search. We were lucky to have Mike Davis, a very well known and highly experienced analyst to open the talks - despite suffering from flu he gave an engaging talk on why open source ...Continue reading