Time for the crystal ball again…

It's always fun to make predictions about the future, especially as one can be pretty sure to be proved wrong in interesting ways. At the start of 2014 we at Flax are looking forward to another year of building open source search and we already have some great client projects in progress that we'll shortly be able to talk about, but what else might be happening this year? Here's some points to note:

Lucene Revolution 2013, Dublin: day 1

Four of the Flax team are in Dublin this week for Lucene Revolution, almost certainly the largest event centred on open source search and specifically Lucene. There are probably a couple of hundred Lucene enthusiasts here and the event is being held at the Aviva Stadium on Landsdowne Road: look out the windows and you can see the pitch! Here are some personal reflections: a number of the talks I attended toda...Continue reading

Finding the elephant in the room: open source search & Hadoop grow closer together

I've been lucky enough to attend two talks on Hadoop in the last few weeks which has made me take a closer look at this technology. In case you didn't know, Hadoop is an Apache top level open source project comprising a framework for distributed computing and storage, originally created by Doug Cutting (also the creator of Apache Lucene) while at Yahoo! in 2005. Distributed computing is carried out using Continue reading

Search events for 2013

Here's a quick roundup of search-related events coming soon: Next week Lucene/Solr Revolution is to be held in San Diego, with a couple of days of training on April 29th & 30th and the main event on the 1st and 2nd May. This is probably the biggest event dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr and features a huge array of pr...Continue reading

Strange bedfellows? The rise of cloud based search

Last night our US partners Lucid Imagination announced that LucidWorks, their packaged and supported version of Apache Lucene/Solr, is available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. It seems like only a few weeks since Amazon announced their own CloudSearch system and no doubt other 'search as a service' providers are waiting in the wings (we're going to need a new acronym as Sa...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2012 – Big Data, search surveys and some FUD from Google

I visited Enterprise Search Europe for the first day only last week, and caught a number of the presentations as well as giving one of my own (which I won't discuss here but you'll hear more about over the next few weeks). First up was Paul Doscher of Lucid Imagination with a lively presentation discussing whether search...Continue reading

Amazon CloudSearch – a game changer?

Amazon have just launched a cloud-based search service, which promises a 'fully managed search service in the cloud' - and it certainly looks impressive, with auto-scaling built in. You simply create a service, upload documents as JSON or XML and then perform searches. For cases where you need to search publically available data this offers a great way to avoid having to install and integrate an...Continue reading