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...
Read more
Last Wednesday evening the Cambridge Search Meetup was held with too very different talks - we started with Zoë Rose, an information architect who has lent her expertise to Proquest, the BBC and now the UK Government. She ga...
Read more
I was lucky enough to attend the London ElasticSearch User Group's Meetup last night - around 130 people came to the Goldman Sachs offices in Fleet Street with many more on the waiting list. It signifies quite how much interest there is in ElasticSearch these days and the event didn't disappoint, with some fascinating talks.
Hugo Pickford-Wardle from Read more
Today Elasticsearch (the company, not the software) announced their first commercial, closed-source product, a monitoring plugin for Elasticsearch (the software, not the company - yes I know this is confusing, one might suspect...
Read more
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 [...
Read more
The exciting GOV.UK project is getting close to its first release date of October 17th and we were asked by them to help with some search tuning as they migrate from Apache Solr to elasticsearch. Although elasticsearch has some great features there are still some areas where it lags Solr, such as the lack of spelling suggestion and proximity...
Read more
Last night there was a small gathering in Cambridge of open source search engine developers and enthusiasts. Richard Boulton hosted the event and began with an introduction to elasticsearch, which is an "Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene". Richard told us about...
Read more
As I announced recently Flax is joining OpenSource Connections, and I recently spent a very pleasant week in Virginia with my new colleagues discussing our plans for the year to come. Without giving too much away I can say that this is a very exciting time to be joining OSC: one thing I will be doing soon is starting to write more about OSC's proven process for supporting our cli...
Read more
Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? In this series of blog posts I'll try to explain what I see as aRead more
