We are an award-winning team of specialists providing outstanding search solutions

As specialists in all aspects of search technology, we have experience of many of the search systems available today, including Lucene, Solr and Xapian. The Flax platform, based on open source technology, can be used to build cutting-edge search applications.

Whether designing a new search system or upgrading your existing search architecture, we can add powerful new features such as facets and relevance feedback.

We are experts in all aspects of search: from extracting data from legacy systems, internal and external sources, to building an effective index and creating powerful, flexible and accurate search interfaces.

We can help you scale your systems to potentially billions of items while making significant savings on your hardware budget. We provide a quality service to clients across the world, with excellent, personalised support.

 

 

The Team

  • Charlie Hull

    Charlie Hull

    Charlie Hull has been an electronic engineer developing high-spec test equipment for the professional sound industry, a software engineer working on both embedded and PC applications, a team leader, project manager and application developer and an independent software consultant. While at Webtop he helped lead a team that developed a half-billion-page internet search engine. As well as being an expert in Windows development, Charlie keeps a strategic view on developments in the Search industry, and contributes to several blogs. A founder of Lemur Consulting, he holds a BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester.

  • Tom Mortimer

    Tom Mortimer

    Tom Mortimer has many years experience working in search applications, starting at Muscat in the mid-90s and going on to lead server software development at Webtop. A founder of Lemur Consulting, he is passionate about creating elegant and functional user interfaces. His technical skills include Linux and Mac OS X system administration, C++, Python, HTML/CSS, PHP, Javascript, SQL etc. Tom writes about practical search issues on the Flax blog. He holds a BSc in Physics from Imperial College, London.

    Lucene/Solr Certified Developer
  • Paul Rudin

    Paul Rudin

    Paul Rudin was the chief developer of the Flax Basic application, an all-in-one intranet search solution designed for ease of management. He is an experienced programmer with extensive knowledge of a large number of programming languages and frameworks including Common Lisp and CLOS, C#, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Python, C++, XSLT, XML, HTML, CSS, Prolog, ML. He was awarded a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from Oxford University, a MSc in Computer Science from London University, and an MA in the same subject from Cambridge.

  • Tom Winch

    Tom Winch

    Tom Winch has worked for several leading sofware companies in Cambridge, including 1Spatial (geographical information systems), Autonomy and Broca Networks (speech technology). With the Flax team, he has been particularly involved in research and development in web-scale indexing and search. He is skilled in Web technologies, C++, Python, PHP, object oriented analysis and design (including UML), SQL, Java and XML. He completed a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Nottingham and an MA from Cambridge University. He is also much in demand as a drummer on the local music scene.

    Lucene/Solr Certified Developer
  • Chris Dawes

    Chris Dawes

    Chris Dawes has over 20 years management and technical experience in high technology industry, and specialises in sales and marketing and strategic planning. Amongst his business development achievements, Chris managed the operations and commercial direction of a new generation search engine developed under a collaborative R&D UK Government grant, administered through the Technology Strategy Board and the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. He holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Bristol.