Quepid & Flax – if you’re not testing your search, you’re doing it wrong!

Earlier this year an e-commerce company asked us to look into how they should improve how they tested their website search queries. A relatively simple task you might think - but the company concerned has a turnover of over a billion pounds with at least half of this via digital channels, so measuring how well search works is essential to preserve revenue. Like (I suspect) many others, they were recording the results of thousands of test searches, carried out manually by their s...Continue reading

Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading

When bad search hurts: finding that elusive ROI

One thing I've noticed from many years attending search conferences is that the return on investment (ROI) in search technology is hard to calculate: this is particularly difficult when considering intranet and/or enterprise search, as users can usually find another way to answer their question. In most cases, some slightly tired numbers are tro...Continue reading