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
I've just seen an article titled Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search which presents a list of somewhat contradictory opinions. I'm afraid I have some serious issues with the experts chosen and the undeniably blinkered views some of them have presented. Firstly, if you're going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don't choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn't anything at ...Continue reading
A sunny evening last night for the latest Cambridge Search Meetup, which featured a couple of talks from Datastax on the highly scalable NoSQL database Apache Cassandra and how it is integrated with Apache Lucene/Solr. Continue reading
The last few weeks have seen a rush of investment in companies that offer Hadoop-powered Big Data platforms - the most recent being Intel's investment in Cloudera, but Hortonworks has also snorted up $100m. Gartner Continue reading
At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading
It's always fun to make predictions about the future, especially as one can be pretty sure to be proved wrong in interesting ways. At the start of 2014 we at Flax are looking forward to another year of building open source search and we already have some great client projects in progress that we'll shortly be able to talk about, but what else might be happening this year? Here's some points to note:
I've been lucky enough to attend two talks on Hadoop in the last few weeks which has made me take a closer look at this technology. In case you didn't know, Hadoop is an Apache top level open source project comprising a framework for distributed computing and storage, originally created by Doug Cutting (also the creator of Apache Lucene) while at Yahoo! in 2005. Distributed computing is carried out using Continue reading
I visited the London Elasticsearch User Groups' meetup last night for the first time, in the rather splendid HQ of Skills Matter just down from Old Street - the venue had a great buzz. The first speaker was Chris Simpson from Continue reading
As usual there's several interesting events on the horizon this autumn: first up is an London Elasticsearch User Group Meetup on Monday September 9th, which will probably be shortly followed by a Cambridge Search Meetup once I have confirmed a venue - we're hoping to include a talk on Solr & Continue reading
Earlier this month I attended the third Enterprise Search Europe conference, this time not to speak but to run workshops, panels, tracks and social events. On Tuesday a colleague and I gave a workshop on Getting the Best from Open Source Search which I hope was useful to attendees: one thing I did take away is how the level of experience with open source and indeed search technology itself can vary widely: some attendees had already experi...Continue reading
