Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 1

This year's Enterprise Search Europe started early for me - I had been invited to give the opening keynote, so I made sure I arrived early enough to make sure my laptop would play nicely with the projector, always a worry! The keynote was well recieved and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about Continue reading

Elasticsearch Meetup – Spark, postcodes and Couchbase

Three speakers for this month's Elasticsearch Meetup (slides now up), kindly hosted by JustEat's technical department. Neil Andrassy kicked us off with a talk about how TheFilter (which you may know counts Peter Gabriel as an investor) use Apache Spark to ...Continue reading

London Lucene/Solr Usergroup – website search and indexing the cloud

This week's London Lucene/Solr Meetup was hosted by asset management company BlackRock who also provided our first speakers. BlackRock manages an astonishing $4.7 trillion in assets (that's more than the GDP of Germany) and operates 90 different websites with around 250,000 content items, so a good and accurate website search engine is essenti...Continue reading

Open source search events roundup for late 2015

Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading

BioSolr at BOSC 2015 – open source search for bioinformatics

Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading

The four types of open source search project

As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories! Continue reading

Elastic London User Group Meetup – scaling with Kafka and Cassandra

The Elastic London User Group Meetup this week was slightly unusual in that the talks focussed not so much on Elasticsearch but rather on how to scale the systems around it using other technologies. First up was Paul Stack with an amusing description of how he had worked on scaling the logging infrastructure for a major restaurant booking website, to cope with hundreds ...Continue reading

Free file filters, search & taxonomy tools from our old Googlecode repository

Google's GoogleCode service is closing down, in case you hadn't heard, and I've just started the process of moving everything over to our Github account. This prompted me to take a look at what's there and there's a surprising amount of open source code I'd forgotten about. So, here's a quick rundown of the useful tools, examples...Continue reading

Rebrands and changing times for Elasticsearch

I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading