A review of Stephen Arnold’s CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Charlie Hull

Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading

Searching for opportunities in Real-Time Analytics

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Charlie Hull

I spent a day last week at a new event from UNICOM, a conference on Real-Time Analytics. Mike Ferguson chaired the event and was kind enough to spend time with me over lunch exploring how search software might fit into the mix, something that has been on my mind since hearing about the Unified Log<...Continue reading

Out and about in January and February

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Charlie Hull

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

Elasticsearch London user group – The Guardian & Orchestrate test the limits

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Charlie Hull

Last week I popped into the Elasticsearch London meetup, hosted this time by The Guardian newspaper. Interestingly, the overall theme of this event was not just what the (very capable and flexible) Elasticsearch software is capable of, but also how things can go wrong and what to do about it. Jenny Sivapalan and Continue reading

Comparing Solr and Elasticsearch – here's the code we used

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Charlie Hull

A couple of weeks ago we presented the initial results of a performance study between Apache Solr and Elasticsearch, carried out by my colleague Tom Mortimer. Over the last few years we've tested both engines for client projects and noticed some significant performance differences, which we thought deserved fuller investigation. ...Continue reading

Searching & monitoring the Unified Log

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Charlie Hull

This week I dropped into the Unified Log Meetup held at the rather hard to find offices of Just Eat (luckily there was some pizza left). The Unified Log movement is interesting and there's a forthcoming book on the subject from Snowplow's Alex De...Continue reading

More than an API – the real third wave of search technology

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Charlie Hull

I recently read a blog post by Karl Hampson of Realise Okana (who offer HP Autonomy and SRCH2 as closed source search options) on his view of the 'third wave' of search. The second wave he identifies (correctly) as open source, admitting somewhat grudgingly that "We’d heard about Lucene for years but no customers seemed to take it seriously until all of a s...Continue reading

Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, Washington DC

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Charlie Hull

Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I'd been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I'll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about me...Continue reading