Lifting the hood of AI – to find a search engine?

A few years ago much marketing noise was made about Big Data. Every software vendor suddenly had a Big Data suite; you could suddenly buy Big Data capable hardware; consultants and experts would release thought pieces, blogs and books all about Big Data and how it would change the world. The reality of course was slightly different: Big Data meant...well, it meant whatever you wanted it to mean for your commercial purpose. For some people, what didn't fit in an Excel spreadsheet was Big Data, fo...Continue reading

Flax announces partnership with Apache Kafka creators Confluent

We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading

Working with Hadoop, Kafka, Samza and the wider Big Data ecosystem

We've been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as 'Big Data' solutions - here's a quick overview of them. The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by D...Continue reading

London Text Analytics Meetup – Making sense of text with Lumi, Signal & Bloomberg

This month's London Text Analytics Meetup, hosted by Bloomberg in their spectacular Finsbury Square offices, was only the second such event this year, but crammed in three great talks and attracted a wide range of people from both academia and business. We started with Gabriella Kazai o...Continue 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

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

More than an API – the real third wave of search technology

I recently read a blog post by Karl Hampson of Realise Okana (who offer HP Autonomy and SRCH2 as closed source search options) on his view of the 'third wave' of search. The second wave he identifies (correctly) as open source, admitting somewhat grudgingly that "We’d heard about Lucene for years but no customers seemed to take it seriously until all of a s...Continue reading