Lucene Solr London: Search Quality Testing and Search Procurement

Mimecast were our kind hosts for the latest London Lucene/Solr Meetup (and even provided goodie bags). It's worth repeating that we couldn't run these events without the help of sponsors and hosts and we're always very grateful (and keep those offers coming!). First up was Andrea Gazzarini presenting a brand new framework for search quality testing. Designed for offline m...Continue reading

Haystack, the search relevance conference – day 2

Two weeks ago I attended the Haystack relevance conference – I’ve already written about my overall impressions and on the first day's talks but the following are some more notes on the conference sessions. Note that some of the presentations I attended have already been covered in detail...Continue reading

No, Elastic X-Pack is not going to be open source – according to Elastic themselves

Elastic are the company founded by the creator of Elasticsearch, Shay Banon. At this time of year they have their annual Elasticon conference in San Francisco and as you might expect a lot of announcements are made during the week of the conference. The major ones to appear this time are that Swiftype, which Elastic acquired last year, has reappeared as Elastic Site Search and that Elastic are opening the code for their commercial X-Pack features. More

Inspiring students to work in Open Source Search

I've recently been asked to join the Industrial Advisory Board for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex and will be talking to students there on Monday 5th February, repeating a similar talk I did last year. The subject is 'Working in Open Source Search' and I'll describe how we founded Flax back in 2001, how we've built, tuned and implemented open source search engines and some of the client projects we've worked on. It's been a fascinating journe...Continue reading

It’s not just about technology – training for search managers is vital

A few weeks ago I sat in on a workshop in London at the Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, run by Jeff Fried of BA Insight. I've known Jeff for many years from various events and we share some views on how search systems should be built and managed - using best-of-breed technology and effective management processes. He was kind enough to ask me to join a recent podcast. During the podcast, we had a great conversation about open source search, enterprise...Continue reading

How to build a search relevance team

We've spent a lot of time working with clients who recognise that their search engine isn't delivering relevant results to users. Often this is seen as solely a technical problem, which can be resolved simply by changing query parameters or the search engine configuration - but technical teams need clear direction on why a result should or should not appear at a certain position, not just request for general relevance improvements. It's thus important to consider relevance as...Continue reading