Solr geolocation searches using WKT – latitude or longitude first?

Matt Pearce writes: We have been working with a client who needs to search for documents based on location, either using a single point or (sometimes very) complex polygons. They supplied the location data in WKT format which we assumed we could feed directly into our search engine (in this case Solr) without any modifications being necessary. Then we started testing the location se...Continue reading

Cambridge Search Meetup: free postcodes from old maps & visualising fish

Last night was a particularly hot Cambridge Search Meetup: someone suggested that next time we lash four punts together and float down the river - would certainly be a little cooler though I'm still not sure how to rig a projector! Our first speaker was Nick Burch who told us about a fascinating past project of his to source freely available postcode data for the UK. His team collected out-of-copyri...Continue reading

ECIR 2011 Industry day – part 2 of 2

Here's the second writeup. We started after lunch with a talk from Flavio Junqueira of Yahoo! on web search engine cacheing. He talked both about the various things that can be cached (query results, term lists and document data) and the pros and cons of dynamic versus static caching. His work has focused on the former, with a decoupled approach - i.e. the cache doesn't automatically know what's cha...Continue reading