Haystack Europe 2018, a brief retrospective

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Charlie Hull

It's been a couple of weeks now since the first Haystack search relevance conference in Europe, which we ran with our partners Open Source Connections (OSC). Just under a hundred people came to the Friends' House in Euston for a day of talks covering both the business and technical aspects of relevance engineering. Doug Turnbull of OSC started the day by introducing what would be a major theme of the conference, Learning to Rank, and how Bloomberg had used and benefited from open sourcing their ...Continue reading

Lifting the hood of AI – to find a search engine?

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Charlie Hull

A few years ago much marketing noise was made about Big Data. Every software vendor suddenly had a Big Data suite; you could suddenly buy Big Data capable hardware; consultants and experts would release thought pieces, blogs and books all about Big Data and how it would change the world. The reality of course was slightly different: Big Data meant...well, it meant whatever you wanted it to mean for your commercial purpose. For some people, what didn't fit in an Excel spreadsheet was Big Data, fo...Continue reading

Catching MICES – a focus on e-commerce search

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Charlie Hull

The second event I attended in Berlin last week was the Mix Camp on e-commerce search (MICES), a small and focused event now in its second year and kindly hosted by Mytoys at their offices. Slides for the talks are available here and I hope videos will appear soon. The first talk was given ...Continue reading

London Lucene/Solr Meetup – Learning to Rank and Hibernate Search

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Charlie Hull

Back to the very impressive Bloomberg lecture theatre for this month's Lucene/Solr Meetup, with an good turnout (I'm guessing 60-70 people). Our first talk came from Diego Ceccarelli of Bloomberg on how his team have created a Solr implementation of Continue reading