It's been an interesting and busy few weeks this autumn - starting with Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona. 'Big Data' was a main theme, with some great presentations including the keynote from Grant Ingersoll and the talk from Eric Baldeschwieler of Hortonworks, showing how ...Continue reading
We're pleased to announce our work with Reed Specialist Recruitment, one of the UK's largest recruitment companies, where we helped them implement an Apache Solr powered application to allow their 3000+ staff to search for and match candidates to jobs. We built an innovative indexing framework, a configuration tool and performance monitoring system for Reed and the system launched on time and under budget, a gr...Continue reading
The diary is filling up quickly already after the summer break (which turned out not to be much of a break at all, what with the HP/Autonomy news and everything). Here's where you can hear us speak over the next few months:
We've been helping to organise a new conference to be held in London this October, Enterprise Search Europe. This two-day event promises to give a 'European perspective on the technology, selection, implementation and optimisation of enterprise-scale search' and features speakers from 3i plc, Logica, The Guardian and a...Continue reading
The Cambridge Enterprise Search Meetup last night featured Francis Rowland of the European Bioinformatics Institute and Rob Stacey of TrueKnowledge, in a newly refurbished venue. Thanks to all those who came and it was good to meet some new faces. Francis talked about how search user interfaces should...Continue reading
We've recently been forging links with the UK's larger open source software community and have joined the Open Source Consortium. Another interesting organisation is Guildfoss who have asked us to speak at an event on 9th June at the British Computer Society's offices in London on discussing the skills necessary for buildin...Continue reading
Last night there was a small gathering in Cambridge of open source search engine developers and enthusiasts. Richard Boulton hosted the event and began with an introduction to elasticsearch, which is an "Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene". Richard told us about...Continue reading
Here's the second writeup. We started after lunch with a talk from Flavio Junqueira of Yahoo! on web search engine cacheing. He talked both about the various things that can be cached (query results, term lists and document data) and the pros and cons of dynamic versus static caching. His work has focused on the former, with a decoupled approach - i.e. the cache doesn't automatically know what's cha...Continue reading
As promised here's a writeup of the day itself. I've split this into two parts. 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 S...Continue reading
I spent part of last week at the 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval in Dublin, as I had been asked to speak during the Industry Day (of which, more later - far too much useful information to cram into one blog post!). Arriving late afternoon on Wednesday I caught up with Olly Betts of Oligarchy, one of the core Xapian developers who'd travelled from New Zealand. Olly ...Continue reading
