Time to replace your Google Search Appliance with open source search

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

Search Solutions 2015 – Is semantic search finally here?

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

Search Solutions 2013, a review

Yesterday was the always interesting Search Solutions one day conference held by the BCS IRSG in London, a mix of talks on different aspects of search. The first presentation was by Behshad Behzadi of Google on Conversational Search, where he showed a speech-capable search in...Continue reading

The trouble with tabbing: editing rich text on the Web

Matt Pearce, who joined the Flax team earlier this year, writes: A recent client wished to convert documents to and from Microsoft Office formats, using a web form as an intermediate step for editing the content. The documents were read in, imported to a Solr search engine, and could then be searched over, cloned, edited and transformed in batches, before being exported to Office once more. The cont...Continue reading

The death of enterprise search is reported, again

There's no doubt that the search market has been in turmoil for many months now: traditional, closed source vendors are either frantically repositioning to avoid the 'juggernaut that is Apache's Solr/Lucene project' or attempting to bore customers to death with Powerpoint. Our sources tell us that in the UK at...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2012 – Big Data, search surveys and some FUD from Google

I visited Enterprise Search Europe for the first day only last week, and caught a number of the presentations as well as giving one of my own (which I won't discuss here but you'll hear more about over the next few weeks). First up was Paul Doscher of Lucid Imagination with a lively presentation discussing whether search...Continue reading

Another powerful API based on Solr launches, searching more patents than Google

Our customer Cambridge Intellectual Property announced yesterday their new API for a collection of 55 million patents - 48 million more than Google Patents. It's great to see a Cambridge company innovating in this space, especially as the service is powered by Apache Solr (we've given them some small assistance with Continue reading

Open source search evening – ElasticSearch, Xapian and GSoC

Last night there was a small gathering in Cambridge of open source search engine developers and enthusiasts. Richard Boulton hosted the event and began with an introduction to elasticsearch, which is an "Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene". Richard told us about...Continue reading