As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories!
I'm just back from Singapore: my first visit to this amazing, dynamic and everchanging city-state, at the kind invitation of Patrick Lambe, to speak at the first Innovations in Knowledge Organisation conference. I think this was probably one of the best organised and most interesting events I've attended in the last few years. The event started with an enthusiastic ...Continue reading
Last week Doug Turnbull of US-based Open Source Connections visited the UK and spoke at our Meetup. His first talk was on Search Relevancy, an area that we often deal with at Flax: how to tune a search engine to give results that our clients deem relevant, without affecting the results for other queries. Using a ...Continue reading
We're travelling a bit over the next few weeks to visit and speak at various events. This weekend Alan Woodward is at Berlin Buzzwords, a hacker-focused conference with a programme full of search talks. He's not speaking this year, but if you want to talk about Lucene, Solr or our own Luwak stored search library and the Continue reading
One thing I've noticed from many years attending search conferences is that the return on investment (ROI) in search technology is hard to calculate: this is particularly difficult when considering intranet and/or enterprise search, as users can usually find another way to answer their question. In most cases, some slightly tired numbers are tro...Continue reading
This week we held another Lucene/Solr London User Group event, kindly hosted by Barclays at their funky Escalator space in Whitechapel. First to talk were two colleagues of mine, Matt Pearce and Tom Winch, on the Continue reading
