A common complaint from our clients is how difficult it is to find staff with experience of search applications and in particular Apache Lucene/Solr or Elasticsearch. With the explosive growth of open source search over the last few years, there simply aren't enough people on the market with the right skills and...Continue reading
Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading
Last week Doug Turnbull of US-based Open Source Connections visited the UK and spoke at our Meetup. His first talk was on Search Relevancy, an area that we often deal with at Flax: how to tune a search engine to give results that our clients deem relevant, without affecting the results for other queries. Using a ...Continue reading
We're travelling a bit over the next few weeks to visit and speak at various events. This weekend Alan Woodward is at Berlin Buzzwords, a hacker-focused conference with a programme full of search talks. He's not speaking this year, but if you want to talk about Lucene, Solr or our own Luwak stored search library and the Continue reading
This week we held another Lucene/Solr London User Group event, kindly hosted by Barclays at their funky Escalator space in Whitechapel. First to talk were two colleagues of mine, Matt Pearce and Tom Winch, on the Continue reading
Google's GoogleCode service is closing down, in case you hadn't heard, and I've just started the process of moving everything over to our Github account. This prompted me to take a look at what's there and there's a surprising amount of open source code I'd forgotten about. So, here's a quick rundown of the useful tools, examples...Continue reading
I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading
We had another London user group Meetup last week, hosted by Reed.co.uk who also provided some tasty pizza - eaten under the 'Love Mondays' sign from their adverts, which now lives in their boardroom! A few new faces this time and a couple of great talks from two companies who have incorporated Solr into their platforms. First up was Andy Hind<...Continue reading
We're speaking at a couple of events soon: if you're in London and interested in Apache Lucene/Solr we're also planning another London User Group Meetup soon. Firstly my colleague Alan Woodward is speaking with Martin Kleppman at FOSDEM in Brussels (31st January-1st February) on Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago we presented the initial results of a performance study between Apache Solr and Elasticsearch, carried out by my colleague Tom Mortimer. Over the last few years we've tested both engines for client projects and noticed some significant performance differences, which we thought deserved fuller investigation. ...Continue reading
