As Martin White writes, search should be regarded as a ‘wicked problem’ – multi-dimensional and hard to resolve using traditional methods. So when we carry out a ‘search audit’, as we recently did for global charity Oxfam, we will consider both technical and non-technical factors – not just the software your organisation is using with its potential flaws and misconfigurations, but how it is being used and by whom.

We’ll consider how content is created for the search engine to index – who controls this process, how shortcuts might be taken or mistakes made, who manages the content quality. We’ll check how you are managing the search and associated software – is version control used correctly, are your team sufficiently trained and supported. We’ll look at your future plans and strategy and consider how these might be helped or hampered by what has gone before – the drag effect of legacy systems and content. We’ll consider the needs of your users, both internal and external, and how you test and maintain the quality of your search results. The human factors are as important as the technical details.

This process involves using our years of experience to ask the right questions – to discover how you represent your organisation in data – and how that data flows, under whose control. The output of the process is a detailed report listing what we discovered, what immediate improvements we can suggest and what we regard as more long-term recommendations. Even if we don’t find a lot wrong it will be reassuring to know you’re on the right path to a great search experience for your users. If we do discover major flaws, we hope to save you a great deal of trouble and expense.

If you’re interested in a search audit do ask us for more details.

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The post FIBEP WMIC 2015 – Open source search for media monitoring with Solr appeared first on Flax.

Using Apache Solr and in under two days we built them a similar feature for their website: since we didn’t have direct access to their development servers we provided both Solr configuration files and a simple JQuery/Javascript demo of the features they needed (it’s about 170 lines of code). Their own developers then integrated these changes based on our notes. I think it’s safe to say that Bride and Groom Direct are a rather smaller business than Sears, but with open source they can have access to equally good search facilities. They’ve been kind enough to let us feature them on our Clients page and as you can see, they’re happy with the results.

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If you’re interested in more details of how we fixed this and a few other elasticsearch issues, you may want to take a look at the code we worked on – one of the best things about working with the GOV.UK team is that it was already up as open source software within a day (yes, you read that right – code paid for by the taxpayer is open source, as it should be!). We’re looking forward to launch day!

Update: changed ‘proximity search’ to ‘proximity boost’ – thanks Alan!

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As our client had a large investment in stored searches (which represent a client’s interests) which were defined in the query language of their previous search engine, we first had to build a modified version of Apache Lucene that replicated exactly this syntax. I’ve previously blogged about how we did this. However this wasn’t the only challenge: search engines are designed to be good at applying a few queries to a very large document collection, not necessarily at applying tens of thousands of stored queries to every single new document. For media monitoring applications this kind of performance is essential as there may be hundreds of thousands of news articles to monitor every day. The system we’ve built is capable of applying tens of thousands of stored queries every second.

With the rapid increase in the volume of content that media monitoring companies have to check for their clients – today’s news isn’t just in print, but online, in social media and indeed multimedia – it may be that open source software is the only way to build monitoring systems that are economically scalable, while remaining accurate and flexible enough to deliver the right results to clients.

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C Spencer are known for their innovative and modern approach – they’re even building their own green power station on a brownfield site in Hull. It’s thus not surprising that they chose cutting-edge open source technology for search: tracking and managing documents correctly is extremely important to their business.

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If you’d like to hear more I’ll be giving a presentation on the project at Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona tomorrow – Wednesday 19th October at 1.30 p.m. – slides and a video will be online after the event.

If you can’t make it to Barcelona I’ll also be talking in London, on the business benefits of open source search, at around 10am on Tuesday 25th October with our client Stephen Wicks, CTO of Gorkana Group as part of Enterprise Search Europe – there are still tickets available and you can even get a 20% discount if you join the Cambridge or London Enterprise Search Meetups, who are hosting a joint event on the Monday evening of the conference.

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The API, available on the Boliven website, offers a REST based service and returns patent data in JSON or XML – so users can easily integrate patent data with their own applications. It can also return PDFs or summaries of the selected patents. In addition, the API will allow users to search and query Boliven’s database of 45+ million science literature documents including journal publications and medical device trials. That’s around 100 million items in total.

Like the Guardian’s Open Platform which I wrote about previously, this is a great example of open source search technology as a platform for new delivery methods – showing how effective (and economical) it can be at this large scale.

It didn’t take me long to find my own small contribution to the patent landscape.

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