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
As many others have noted, Google have recently announced their Google Search Appliance (GSA) will not be available for sale from 2017. Search gurus Miles Kehoe and Martin White have written an insightful analysis of the move with some recommendations as to what to do - because your GSA will simply stop working once the 2-year license expires. I don't agree with Lauren...Continue reading
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
I had been planning not to continue with these posts, but after Matt Weber pointed out the github pull requests (which to my embarrassment I'd not even noticed) he'd made to address some methodological flaws, another attempt was the least I could do. For Solr there was a slight reduction in mean search time, from 39ms (for my original, suboptimal query structure) to 34ms and median search time from 27ms to 25ms - see figure 1. Elasticsearch, on the ...Continue reading
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
It's been a very busy few months for events - so busy that it's quite a relief to be back in the office! Back in late November I travelled to Vienna to speak at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress with our client Infomedia about how we've helped them to migrate their media monitoring platform from the elderly, unsupported and hard to scale Continue reading
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In this month's Flax Newsletter:
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
