Why GCloud search is badly broken & how to fix it

The GCloud initiative and the associated CloudStore are a great idea - hoping to level the field of UK government IT supply, take advantage of flexible and agile delivery of software and services and help SMEs like ourselves compete against the large System Integrators (SIs) that dominate this market. GCloud sales have now reached £154m although this is still a fraction of what the UK government spends on IT. We're on GCloud 5 Continue reading

Better search for e-petitions – handling misspelled content with a Solr phonetic filter

We recently overhauled the search functionality for the UK government's e-petitions site, run by the Government Digital Service, a new team within the Cabinet Office. Search has an important function on the site; users are forced to search for existing petitions which cover their area of concern before creating a new one. This cuts down on the number of near-duplicate petitions, and makes petitions ...Continue reading

Cambridge Search Meetup review – Two different kinds of university search

James Alexander of the Open University talked first on the Access to Video Assets project, a prototype system that looked at preservation, digitisation and access to thousands of TV programs originally broadcast by the BBC. James' team have worked out an approach based on open source software - storing programme metadata and video assets in a Fedora Commons repository, indexing and searchi...Continue reading

Website Redesign

We've now completely redesigned the Flax website - we hope you like it. We've tried to focus more on explaining exactly what we do and how the Flax open source search platform might be able to help your business. Of course, there are sure to be teething problems - if you find anything that doesn't work do let us know!...Continue reading