Search Solutions 2015 – Is semantic search finally here?

Last week I attended one of my favourite annual search events, Search Solutions, held at the British Computer Society's base in Covent Garden. As usual this is a great chance to see what's new in the linked worlds of web, intranet and enterprise search and this year there was a focus on semantic search by several of the presenters. 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

Search Solutions 2012 – a review

Last Thursday I spent the day at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event, run by their Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Unlike some events I could mention, this isn't a forum for sales pitches, over-inflated claims or business speak - just some great presentations on all aspects of search and some lively networking or discussion. It's one of my favourite events of t...Continue reading

Search Solutions 2011 review

I spent yesterday at the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group's annual Search Solutions conference, which brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in search. The day started with a talk by John Tait on the challenges of patent search where different units are concerned - where for example a search for a plastic with a melting poin...Continue reading

ECIR 2011 Industry day – part 2 of 2

Here's the second writeup. We started after lunch with a talk from Flavio Junqueira of Yahoo! on web search engine cacheing. He talked both about the various things that can be cached (query results, term lists and document data) and the pros and cons of dynamic versus static caching. His work has focused on the former, with a decoupled approach - i.e. the cache doesn't automatically know what's cha...Continue reading