Image searching

Searching images is a difficult problem, and it's not a feature offered by many commercial search engines. Some will cheat slightly, by indexing the title or filename of the image, or the text surrounding an image embedded on a page, and call this 'image search' - but this method doesn't work very well, especially when you have a standalone image called 'IMG0000064.jpg' which is actually a picture of an apple. We've seen some good demos of actual image search - I...Continue reading

Introducing the Flax Blog

In concert with our new Flax website, we've decided to start blogging about development of Xapian and Flax, search technology in general, interesting open source projects and indeed anything else we can think of. In this first post, I'll try to explain a little about the motivation behind the Flax project. Here at Lemur Consulting we've worked with search engines for decades, starting with Continue reading