Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 2 – Elasticsearch & others

Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 1 – Apache Lucene/Solr

          Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

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

XJoin for Solr, part 1: filtering using price discount data

In this blog post I want to introduce you to a new Apache Solr plugin component called XJoin. I'll show how we can use this to solve a common problem in e-commerce - how to use price discount data, provided by an external web API, to either filter the results of a product search or boost scores. A further post will show another example, using click-through data to influence the score of subsequent searches.

What is XJoin?

...Continue reading

Luwak 1.3.0 released

The latest version of Luwak, our open-source streaming query engine, has been released on the Sonatype Nexus repository and will be making its way to Maven Central in the next few hours.  Here's a summary of the new features and improvements we've made: Batch processing I...Continue reading

Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading