Elasticsearch London user group – The Guardian & Orchestrate test the limits
Last week I popped into the Elasticsearch London meetup, hosted this time by The Guardian newspaper. Interestingly, the overall theme of this event was not just what the (very capable and flexible) Elasticsearch software is capable of, but also how things can go wrong and what to do about it. Jenny Sivapalan and Continue reading
Turning search upside down with powerful open source search software
Comparing Solr and Elasticsearch – here's the code we used
A couple of weeks ago we presented the initial results of a performance study between Apache Solr and Elasticsearch, carried out by my colleague Tom Mortimer. Over the last few years we've tested both engines for client projects and noticed some significant performance differences, which we thought deserved fuller investigation. ...Continue reading
Searching & monitoring the Unified Log
This week I dropped into the Unified Log Meetup held at the rather hard to find offices of Just Eat (luckily there was some pizza left). The Unified Log movement is interesting and there's a forthcoming book on the subject from Snowplow's Alex De...Continue reading
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
A new Meetup for Lucene & Solr
Last Friday we held the first Meetup for a new Apache Lucene/Solr User Group we've recently created (there's a very popular one for Elasticsearch so it seemed only fair Solr had ...Continue reading
Flax Newsletter November 2014
This month's Flax Newsletter features:
- Turning search upside down for Infomedia
- BioSolr at the EBI
- A new London Lucene/Solr User Group
More than an API – the real third wave of search technology
I recently read a blog post by Karl Hampson of Realise Okana (who offer HP Autonomy and SRCH2 as closed source search options) on his view of the 'third wave' of search. The second wave he identifies (correctly) as open source, admitting somewhat grudgingly that "We’d heard about Lucene for years but no customers seemed to take it seriously until all of a s...Continue reading
Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, Washington DC
Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I'd been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I'll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about me...Continue reading






