Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 2 – Elasticsearch & others

Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 1 – Apache Lucene/Solr

          Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

The fun and frustration of writing a plugin for Elasticsearch for ontology indexing

As part of our work on the BioSolr project, I have been continuing to work on the various Elasticsearch ontology annotation plugins (note that even though the project started with a focus on Solr - thus the name - we have also been developing some features for Ela...Continue reading

XJoin for Solr, part 1: filtering using price discount data

In this blog post I want to introduce you to a new Apache Solr plugin component called XJoin. I'll show how we can use this to solve a common problem in e-commerce - how to use price discount data, provided by an external web API, to either filter the results of a product search or boost scores. A further post will show another example, using click-through data to influence the score of subsequent searches.

What is XJoin?

...Continue reading

BioSolr at BOSC 2015 – open source search for bioinformatics

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

Autumn events roundup – ESS DC, Solr vs Elasticsearch & a new Meetup

It's looking like a busy Autumn for search events - first, I'm presenting at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014 in Washington DC on November 5th, talking about 'Turning Search Upside Down with open source software'. I'll be describing how we've replaced various underperforming, big name closed source search engines with faster & more scalable open ...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