The financial information service Bloomberg hosted last Friday's London Search Meetup in their offices on Finsbury Square - the venue had to be seen to be believed, furnished as it is with neon, chrome, modern art and fishtanks. A slight step up from the usual room above a pub! The first presenter was Ramkumar Aiyengar of Bloomberg on their new search...Continue reading
At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading
We’ve been working internally on a document encapsulating how we build (and recommend others should build) search applications based on Apache Solr, probably the most popular open source search engine library. As an early Christmas present we’re releasing these as a two part series – if you have any feedback we’d welcome comments! Here's the second part, you can also read the Continue reading
A slow start to the day, possibly due to the aftereffects of the conference party the night before, but the stadium was still buzzing. I went to Rafal Kuć's talk on SolrCloud which is becoming the standard way to build scalable Solr installations (we have two projects underway that use it). The shard splitting features in recent releases of Solr were interesting - previous...Continue reading
Four of the Flax team are in Dublin this week for Lucene Revolution, almost certainly the largest event centred on open source search and specifically Lucene. There are probably a couple of hundred Lucene enthusiasts here and the event is being held at the Aviva Stadium on Landsdowne Road: look out the windows and you can see the pitch! Here are some personal reflections: a number of the talks I attended toda...Continue reading
I visited the London Elasticsearch User Groups' meetup last night for the first time, in the rather splendid HQ of Skills Matter just down from Old Street - the venue had a great buzz. The first speaker was Chris Simpson from Continue reading
Roo Reynolds from the GDS team has written a great blog post about the ongoing process of tuning the search for gov.uk which I can highly recommend. We regularly see situations where a search project has been set up as 'fire and forget' - which is never a good idea: not only does content grow, but use...Continue reading
The most well known open source search engine, Apache Lucene/Solr, has a rival in Elasticsearch, also based on Apache Lucene. Or maybe it doesn't. I'm not convinced that there's an actual battle going on here, above and beyond the fact that the commercial companies formed to support each technology (Lucidworks and Elasticsearch [...Continue reading
This morning the largest open source search project, Apache Lucene/Solr, released a new version with a raft of new features. We've been advising clients to consider version 4.0 for several months now, as the alpha and beta versions have become available, and we know of several already running this version on live sites. Here's a few highlights:
Google have launched a new version of their search appliance this week - this is the GSA of course, not the Google Mini which was canned in summer 2012 (someone hasn't told Google UK it seems - try buying one though). Although t...Continue reading
