The Elastic London User Group Meetup this week was slightly unusual in that the talks focussed not so much on Elasticsearch but rather on how to scale the systems around it using other technologies. First up was Paul Stack with an amusing description of how he had worked on scaling the logging infrastructure for a major restaurant booking website, to cope with hundreds ...Continue reading
I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading
Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading
After a long day at a Real Time Analytics event (of which more later) I dropped into the Elasticsearch London User Group, hosted by Red Badger and provided with a ridiculously huge amount of pizza (I have a theory that you'll be able to spot an Elasticsearch developer in a few years by the size of their pizza-filled belly). ...Continue reading
Last week I popped into the Elasticsearch London meetup, hosted this time by The Guardian newspaper. Interestingly, the overall theme of this event was not just what the (very capable and flexible) Elasticsearch software is capable of, but also how things can go wrong and what to do about it. Jenny Sivapalan and Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago we presented the initial results of a performance study between Apache Solr and Elasticsearch, carried out by my colleague Tom Mortimer. Over the last few years we've tested both engines for client projects and noticed some significant performance differences, which we thought deserved fuller investigation. ...Continue reading
This week I dropped into the Unified Log Meetup held at the rather hard to find offices of Just Eat (luckily there was some pizza left). The Unified Log movement is interesting and there's a forthcoming book on the subject from Snowplow's Alex De...Continue reading
Last week I attended one of my favourite annual search events, Search Solutions, held at the British Computer Society's base in Covent Garden. As usual this is a great chance to see what's new in the linked worlds of web, intranet and enterprise search and this year there was a focus on semantic search by several of the presenters. Continue reading
Last Friday we held the first Meetup for a new Apache Lucene/Solr User Group we've recently created (there's a very popular one for Elasticsearch so it seemed only fair Solr had ...Continue reading
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
