No, Elastic X-Pack is not going to be open source – according to Elastic themselves

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Charlie Hull

Elastic are the company founded by the creator of Elasticsearch, Shay Banon. At this time of year they have their annual Elasticon conference in San Francisco and as you might expect a lot of announcements are made during the week of the conference. The major ones to appear this time are that Swiftype, which Elastic acquired last year, has reappeared as Elastic Site Search and that Elastic are opening the code for their commercial X-Pack features. More

Asking the right questions in a Search Audit

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Charlie Hull

We’re often asked to review how our clients use search technology, both open and closed source (although we specialise in the former, we’ve also encountered most of the commercial search engines over the last 16 years). One common mistake is to assume that search is purely a technical problem, and that all issues can be resolved by writing software and changing configurations, or worse by throwing away the old engine and replacing it with a new one at huge expense. More

Inspiring students to work in Open Source Search

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Charlie Hull

I've recently been asked to join the Industrial Advisory Board for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex and will be talking to students there on Monday 5th February, repeating a similar talk I did last year. The subject is 'Working in Open Source Search' and I'll describe how we founded Flax back in 2001, how we've built, tuned and implemented open source search engines and some of the client projects we've worked on. It's been a fascinating journe...Continue reading

Elastic acquires Swiftype and broadens its offering to include enterprise search

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Charlie Hull

The news today that Elastic (the company behind the open source Elasticsearch software) has acquired Swiftype will have surprised a few people, even though Elastic has already acquired a good number of other companies. Swiftype have a couple of products that deliver cloud-based site and enterprise search and under the hood, all of this is built on Elasticsearch. Swiftype are part of a new ...Continue reading

It’s not just about technology – training for search managers is vital

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Charlie Hull

A few weeks ago I sat in on a workshop in London at the Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, run by Jeff Fried of BA Insight. I've known Jeff for many years from various events and we share some views on how search systems should be built and managed - using best-of-breed technology and effective management processes. He was kind enough to ask me to join a recent podcast. During the podcast, we had a great conversation about open source search, enterprise...Continue reading

Worth the wait – Apache Kafka hits 1.0 release

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Charlie Hull

We've known about Apache Kafka for several years now - we first encountered it when we developed a prototype streaming Boolean search engine for media monitoring with our own library Luwak. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform with some simple but powerful concepts - everything it deals with is a stream ...Continue reading

How to build a search relevance team

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Charlie Hull

We've spent a lot of time working with clients who recognise that their search engine isn't delivering relevant results to users. Often this is seen as solely a technical problem, which can be resolved simply by changing query parameters or the search engine configuration - but technical teams need clear direction on why a result should or should not appear at a certain position, not just request for general relevance improvements. It's thus important to consider relevance as...Continue reading

Announcing our new book, Searching the Enterprise

Posted on July 26, 2017 by Charlie Hull

For the last year or so I've been working with Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex on a long-form journal article on enterprise search - although at 156 pages this is more of a book than a journal. Released as part of the Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval series by Now Publishing, the b...Continue reading

A lack of cognition and some fresh FUD from Forrester

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Charlie Hull

Last night the estimable Martin White, intranet and enterprise search expert and author of many books on the subject, flagged up two surprising articles from Forrester who have declared that Cognitive Search (we'll define this using their own terms in...Continue reading

Recipe for a strategic search review

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Charlie Hull

We're sometimes asked by clients to examine not just their technical implementation of search, but also the wider picture: how search functionality is exposed to users, how it compares to competitors' websites and best practice. This process usually takes us ten days to two weeks and results in a highly detailed report with clear recommendations for improvement. This process is slightly different each time, but usually includes the following steps, shown with some examples of questions we mig...Continue reading