The day started with a talk by John Tait on the challenges of patent search where different units are concerned – where for example a search for a plastic with a melting point of 200°C wouldn’t find a patent that uses °F or Kelvin. John presented a solution from max.recall, a plugin for Apache Solr that promises to solve this issue. We then heard from Lewis Crawford of the UK Web Archive on their very large index of 240m archived webpages – some great features were shown including a postcode-based browser. The system is based on Apache Solr and they are also using ‘big data’ projects such as Apache Hadoop – which by the sound of it they’re going to need as they’re expecting to be indexing a lot more websites in the future, up to 4 or 5 million. The third talk in this segment came from Toby Mostyn of Polecat on their MeaningMine social media monitoring system, again built on Solr (a theme was beginning to emerge!). MeaningMine implements an iterative query method, using a form of relevance feedback to help users contribute more useful query information.

Before lunch we heard from Ricardo Baeza-Yates of Yahoo! on moving beyond the ‘ten blue links’ model of web search, with some fascinating ideas around how we should consider a Web of objects rather than web pages. Gabriella Kazai of Microsoft Research followed, talking about how best to gather high-quality relevance judgements for testing search algorithms, using crowdsourcing systems such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Some good insights here as to how a high-quality task description can attract high-quality workers.

After lunch we heard from Marianne Sweeney with a refreshingly candid treatment of how best to tune enterprise search products that very rarely live up to expectations – I liked one of her main points that “the product is never what was used in the demo”. Matt Taylor from Funnelback followed with a brief overview of his company’s technology and some case studies.

The last section of the day featured Iain Fletcher of Search Technologies on the value of metadata and on their interesting new pipeline framework, Aspire. (As an aside, Iain has also joined the Pipelines meetup group I set up recently). Next up was Jared McGinnis of the Press Association on their work on Semantic News – it was good to see an openly available news ontology as a result. Ian Kegel of British Telecom came next with a talk about TV program recommendation systems, and we finished with Kristian Norling’s talk on a healthcare information system that he worked on before joining Findwise. We ended with a brief Fishbowl discussion which asked amongst other things what the main themes of the day had been – my own contribution being “everyone’s using Solr!”.

It’s rare to find quite so many search experts in one room, and the quality of discussions outside the talks was as high as the quality of the talks themselves – congratulations are due to the organisers for putting together such an interesting programme.

One can’t deny that the search market is going through some huge changes at the moment. Larger vendors are being acquired which can lead to some major (and not always welcome) changes in the product, pricing and service. Smaller vendors are finding it increasingly hard to compete with the plethora of powerful open source solutions (we’ve heard rumours of prices of closed source solutions being dropped radically to attempt to secure new business). There are also some interesting moves towards more comprehensive Business Intelligence and Unified Access solutions, such as Attivio.

I don’t think enterprise search is dying as a market or an offering, simply changing – and hopefully for the better, into an era of more realistic pricing, solutions that actually work (rather than promising ‘magic’) and more openness in terms of the technology and capability.

However the reaction isn’t all positive – the FT implies this deal is at the “lunatic end of the valuation spectrum”. Law Technology News says “Autonomy’s e-discovery revenue stream is high-end but unsustainable” and quotes users of the system with problems: “We had a lot of issues with the applications crashing, the documents tending not to get checked in”….”"[Autonomy sales staff] were pricey, arrogant, and they couldn’t care less about us. … It cannot get any worse.”.

HP will have to work hard to integrate Autonomy into both its corporate culture and software frameworks – a problem currently faced by Microsoft since its acquisition of FAST a short while ago. Stephen Arnold thinks this process will be “risky”. What it means for the rest of the search sector is harder to guess, although Martin White of Intranet Focus says this deal indicates HP can see a “future in search applications” and, interestingly, “A number of privately-held search vendors are probably working out what their valuation would be”.

My view is that this is just the latest of huge shifts in the enterprise search market, partly spurred on by the rise of open source options and the gradual realisation that the huge license fees charged by some vendors may be unsustainable. I don’t think Autonomy will be the last company looking for a safe haven in the years to come.

“In these rapidly changing times we don’t know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it’s important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data volumes that may not scale linearly. Maintaining control over the future of your search software is also key. Open source search has come of age and every modern business should be aware of its advantages.”

It’s available in our downloads area, together with several case studies on open source search projects we’ve carried out for clients.

The first presentation was from Martin Szummer of Microsoft Research on ‘Learning to Rank’. I’d seen some of the content before, presented by Mike Taylor at our own Cambridge Search Meetup, but Martin had the chance to go into more detail about a ‘recipe’ for learning to rank a set of results, using gradient descent. One application he suggested was merging lists of results from different, although related queries: for example in a situation where users don’t know how best to phrase a query, the engine can suggest alternatives (“jupiter’s mass” / “mass of jupiter”), carry out several searches and merge the results to provide a best result. Some fascinating ideas here although it may be a while before we see practical applications in enterprise search.

Doug Aberdeen of Google was next with a description of the Gmail Priority Inbox. The system looks at 300 features of email to attempt to predict what is ‘important’ email for each user – starting with a default global model (so it works ‘out of the box’) and then adjusting slightly over time. Some huge challenges here due to the scale of the problem (we all know how big Gmail is!) and also due to the fact that the team can’t debug with ‘real’ data – as everyone’s email is private. Luckily various Googlers have allowed their email accounts to be used for testing.

Richard Boulton of Celestial Navigation followed with a discussion of some practical search problems he’s encounted, in particular when working on the Artfinder website. Some good lessons here: “search is a commodity”, “a search system is never finished” and “search providers have different aims to users”. He discussed how he developed an ‘ArtistRank’ to solve problems of what exactly to return for the query ‘Leonardo’, and how eventually a four-way classification system was developed for the site. One good tip he had for debugging ranking was an ‘explain view’ showing exactly how positions in a list of results are calculated.

After a short break we had Tyler Tate, who again spoke recently in Cambridge, so I won’t repeat his slides again here. Next was Martin White of Intranet Focus, introducing his method for benchmarking search results within organisations. He suggested that search within enterprises is often in a pretty bad state – which our experience at Flax bears out – and showed a detailed checklist approach to evaluating and improving the search experience. His checklist has a theoretical maximum score of 270, sadly very few companies manage more than 50 points.

We then moved to lunch – I’ll write about the afternoon sessions in a subsequent post.

First of the talks was from Tyler Tate of TwigKit, who described the typical search process as a ‘funnel’, narrowing the available options to an eventual conclusion. He told us how the original definition of search removed the user from the picture, and how to improve things we should make it easy to organise, annotate and compare search results to allow both the user and the system itself to learn. His slides are available here.

After a short break we heard from Mike Taylor of Microsoft Research who led us through the history of ranking models, from the classic BM25, through ‘black box’ systems using machine learning methods including gradient descent and neural networks. He mentioned LambdaRank which was unfamiliar to most of us (some papers by Burges et al are available on the Microsoft site). Interestingly it seems that the focus at Microsoft has shifted back to probabilistic models and Mike showed examples including a system for predicting ‘real’ clicks on online adverts (as opposed to automatic clicks by web robots).

Thanks to our speakers and everyone who came and we hope to continue what is proving to be a popular series of events. Next is a gathering of those involved in open source search on Tuesday 3rd May – hope to see some of you there.

You can also hear me talk at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in Dublin, as part of Industry Day on Thursday 21st April alongside speakers from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and IBM amongst others. Do get in touch if you’re attending and would like to meet up for a chat about search over a pint of Guinness!

Today, the city is still home to innovative search companies, including True Knowledge, Grapeshot and of course ourselves. We know of many more ‘under the radar’ developing search technologies both to complement existing systems and as completely new approaches to information retrieval, including visual search.

To encourage networking and to help keep the city at the forefront of search developments, we’ve created the Enterprise Search Cambridge Meetup group and our first meeting is on February 16th – all are welcome, whether currently working with search and related technologies or simply interested in the possibilities. Hope to meet you there!

Next is the British Computer Society’s Search Solutions 2010 in London on October 21st, where I’m giving a presentation titled “What’s the story with open source? – Searching and monitoring news media with open-source technology”.

Both events feature a wide range of other speakers from organisations such as Cisco, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google and Microsoft.

Platform choice can be a key issue for those looking to implement advanced search, as there may be significant existing in-house expertise and investment in a particular platform. Our Flax solution works just as well on Windows, Linux or Solaris. It’s sad to see such a powerful technology as FAST become so narrow in focus, but it’s not particularly surprising after the Microsoft acquisition.

UPDATE: more coverage on this from The Register