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Tag Archives: flax
Finding French TV with Flax
We've recently been working with mySkreen, who like Hulu in the U.S. provide a service for finding and viewing television programs via your web browser. mySkreen is the brainchild of Frédéric Sitterlé, previously Head of New Media at the Le Figaro media group. mySkreen works with French-language content, and is currently indexing over 1.6 million programmes (and counting). Using F...Continue reading
Replacing relational databases with search engines for simple lookups
One of the things we often notice about existing systems based on relational databases (RDB) is that as they scale to millions of items, simple lookup tasks become slow and inefficient. These tasks don't usually require complicated database operations, so in most cases it is possible to relocate the data from the RDB into a search engine like Flax. Consider a system where a search engine has already been implemented to search textual product information, but numerical data on each product, such...Continue reading
Whitepaper on enterprise search
Our technical partners Cognidox have released a whitepaper detailing their view of the enterprise search market, titled "Why you can't just 'Google' for Enterprise Knowledge" - it's well worth a read. You can download the PDF from their archive....Continue reading
Enterprise search – for free
We recently helped a small marine consultancy, running a Windows network, implement a completely free enterprise search solution. Even SMEs are now finding it hard to keep on top of the information they produce, and there are few low-cost options for searching their documents. Read the case study here (PDF). ...Continue reading
Perl client for Flax Search Server
Flax Search Server now has a Perl client, thanks to the guys at Cognidox, who have blogged about why they needed to improve the search facility for their powerful document management system....Continue reading
Python and Flax presentation
My colleague Richard Boulton will be presenting at Europython in Birmingham, U.K. next week, specifically at 15.30 on Tuesday 30th June - an abstract is available. He'll be talking about Xapian, Xappy and Flax, and showing examples of these in action including one using a Django integration layer....Continue reading
Flax Search Service alpha release
The Flax team are pleased to announce the alpha release of Flax Search Service (FSS). FSS combines powerful, high-level indexing and search features with a well-designed Web Services interface. FSS is Open Source software (under the MIT licence) and is available as a free download from Google Code. Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their many advantages. FSS provides...Continue reading
Flax stack and pre-built binaries
We've updated the Flax website with a page showing the Flax software stack - hopefully this will go some way towards explaining how Xapian, Xappy and parts of Flax all fit together. There's still lots in development so expect some more news later this month. As part of this, we've created a new page bringing together all the Win32 files for Xapian that we maintain - including some pre-built binaries for those of you who don't want to compile Xapian yourself. We're working on creating one-clic...Continue reading
More on performance metrics
Anurag Goel recently carried out a comparitive test of Xapian/Flax and Lucene/Solr. Some interesting results here: it seems Lucene is faster at building indexes, but Xapian is faster and possibly more accurate at searching. We can expect some further speed improvements over the next few months as a new, more compact backend to Xapian is released. By the way, the article mentions Xappy: this is a Python interface to Xapian that is a major part of our Flax enterprise search platform. You can ge...Continue reading
