Elasticon London 2015 – more products, more scale, more users!

Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic. Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...Continue reading

Elasticsearch London user group – The Guardian & Orchestrate test the limits

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

The Fall and rise of search in a world of Big Data – part 2

The theme of Big Data continued at the next conference I attended, the first Enterprise Search Europe held in London. There was a good mix of presentations ranging from the academic to the practical, my favourite probably being Martin Belam and colleague's talk about using Solr to dynamically generate content for the ne...Continue reading

Whitepaper – Why you should be considering open source search

I've uploaded a whitepaper I wrote a short while ago : "In these rapidly changing times we don't know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it's important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data volumes that may not scale linearly. Maintaining control over the future of your search software is also key. Open source search has come of age and every modern business should be awa...Continue reading

Open source in the UK

We've recently been forging links with the UK's larger open source software community and have joined the Open Source Consortium. Another interesting organisation is Guildfoss who have asked us to speak at an event on 9th June at the British Computer Society's offices in London on discussing the skills necessary for buildin...Continue reading

Online Information 2010 – it’s quiet, too quiet

We dropped in to the Online 2010 event at Olympia this week, and were immediately struck by how quiet the event was: yes, there's been some terrible weather recently in the UK but there were fewer stalls than last year, a smaller exhibition space and very few exhibitors in the enterprise search space - no Autonomy, Google, Vivisimo or Endeca for example. Unlike previous years there was no dedicated 'search' area on the exhibition floor, and we did see a few unmanned stands from mid afternoon. Is...Continue reading

When search isn’t just search at The Guardian

A fascinating event last night as the Guardian team told us more about how they've used open source search technology to build their new open platform. The presentations were brief and to-the-point, and covered how the team have created a detailed, rich API to their news content, all built on the open source engine Continue reading