IntraTeam 2015 – a brief visit

Last week I dropped in on the IntraTeam 2015 conference in Copenhagen, an event focused on intranets with some content on enterprise search. After a rather pleasant evening of Thai food and networking I attended the last day of the event. The keynote speaker was Dave Snowden, who has an amusing and rather curmudgeonly style of presentation, making sure to note the previous presenters he'd disagreed with for their over-reliance on simplistic concepts of k...Continue reading

BioSolr – building better search for bioinformatics

The entire Flax technical team spent the day at the European Bioinformatics Institute yesterday discussing an exciting new project we'll begin this coming September, BioSolr. Funded by the BBSRC this collaboration between Flax and the EBI aims “to significantly advance the state of the art with regard to indexing and querying biomedical data with freely available open source software”. Continue reading

Searching for IP addresses in text with Elasticsearch

We recently implemented a search solution for a customer using Elasticsearch. Most of their requirements were fairly standard, however they also wanted to be able to search for IP addresses embedded in the document text, using a flexible and precise search syntax, e.g. given the following document fragment:

    ... the API can be accessed at 167.87.3.201 on port 8700 ...

the following searches should all find the document:

...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2014 day 1 – Decisions, research and a Meetup quiz

This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading

Search Solutions 2013, a review

Yesterday was the always interesting Search Solutions one day conference held by the BCS IRSG in London, a mix of talks on different aspects of search. The first presentation was by Behshad Behzadi of Google on Conversational Search, where he showed a speech-capable search in...Continue reading

Background resources for Enterprise Search

If you're planning an enterprise search project and have no background in the technologies or principles involved, here are some tips to get you started. This isn't going to be a definitive list so if you know more, please do comment. There haven't been a lot of books written on this area over the years, but more are appearing now (especially on open source options). Continue reading

Enterprise Search Meetup: exploratory search, TravelMatch and Stephen Arnold

Last night I went to another excellent Enterprise Search London Meetup, at Skinkers near London Bridge. I'd been at the Online show all day, which was rather tiring, so it was great to sit down with beer and nibbles and hear some excellent speakers. Max Wilson kicked off with a talk on Continue reading

Search Patterns, a great collection

Peter Morville has created a Flickr collection of 'search patterns', showing the different kind of search interfaces available. I can highly recommend you take a look if you'd like some good examples of clustering, faceted navigation, auto-suggest and interfaces for certain sectors such as e-commerce. We often find these concepts difficult to explain to customers without some ...Continue reading