Further revolutions

Back for the second day of Lucene Revolution, with some great talks on migrating to Solr from FAST ESP, the new flexible indexing features coming to Lucene 'real soon now', and finishing off with a panel discussion. I felt privileged to sit as part of this panel between Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, and Paul Doscher of Exalead - the discussion was lively and interesting (I hope!) to the audience. I'm looking forward to returning to the UK ...Continue reading

Packaged solutions and customisability, the Python way

With any large scale software installation, there is going to be some customisation and tweaking necessary, and enterprise search systems are no exception. Whatever features are packaged with a system, some of those you need will be missing and some won't be used at all. It's rare to see a situation where the search engine can just be installed straight out of the box. Our Flax system is based on the Xapian core, which has a set of bindings to various differe...Continue reading

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

When real-time search isn't

Avi Rappoport writes about 'real-time' search, a popular subject at the moment. Twitter search is one example of this kind of application, where a stream of new content is arriving very quickly. From a search engine developer's point of view there are various things to consider: how quickly new content must become searchable, how to balance this against performance demands and how to rank ...Continue reading

Search requirements and asking the right questions

When we're contacted by potential clients, we have to gather as much information as possible about how and why they need search technology. This either takes the form of a physical or telephone meeting and much scribbling in notebooks, or a long exchange of emails. In all cases there are some important questions that must be answered, and I thought it might be useful to list the most common ones here: How many items do you need to search? The number of items to search varies w...Continue reading