Out with the old – and in with the new Lucene query parser?

Over the years we've dealt with quite a few migration projects where the query syntax of the client's existing search engine must be preserved. This might be because other systems (or users) depend on it, or a large number of stored expressions exist and it is difficult or uneconomic to translate them all by hand. Our usual approach is to write a query parser, which understands the current syntax but creates a Continue reading

Out and about in January and February

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

Enterprise Search Europe 2014 day 1 – Decisions, research and a Meetup quiz

This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading

Three reasons why your search may be prehistoric

ArnoldIT wondered today why we were bothering to announce an upgrade to the venerable dtSearch engine, when they "weren’t aware of too many people still using that software". Perhaps it's time for a quick reality check here - we regularly see clients with search engines that many would consider prehistoric still in active use. Here's some reasons why that might be so:

An open source replacement for the dtSearch closed source search engine

We've been working on a client project where we needed to replace the dtSearch closed source search engine, which doesn't perform that well at scale in this case. As the client has significant investment in stored queries (it's for a monitoring application) they were keen that the new engine spoke exactly the same query language as the old - so we've built a version of Apache Lucene to replace dtSearch. There are a ...Continue reading

How not to make the same mistake twice

We've been aware that some FAST customers will be considering migration for a while now - but Autonomy have finally caught up. However, if you migrate from one closed source solution to another, how can you guarantee that the same sort of events that have led to the current situation won't happen again? With open source, there's no vendor lock-in, a wide choice of companies to assist you with develo...Continue reading