From February 1st 2019 Flax’s Managing Director Charlie Hull will be joining OpenSource Connections (OSC), Flax’s long-standing US partner, as a senior Managing Consultant. Charlie will manage a new UK division of OSC who will also acquire some of Flax’s assets and brands. OSC are a highly regarded organisation in the world of search and relevance, wrote the seminal book Relevant Search and run the popular Haystack relevance conference. Their clients include the US Patent Office, the Wikimedia Foundation and Under Armour and their services include comprehensive training, Discovery engagements, Trusted Advisor consulting and expert implementation.

Lemur Consulting Ltd., which as most of you will know trades as Flax, will continue to operate and to complete current projects but will not be taking on any new business after January 2019. For any new business we will be forwarding all future Flax enquiries to OSC where Charlie will as ever be very happy to discuss requirements and how OSC’s expert team (which may include some familiar faces!) might help.

We are all very excited about this new development as it will create a larger team of independent search & relevance experts with a global reach. We fully expect to build on Flax’s 17 year history of providing high quality search solutions as part of OSC. We intend to continue managing the London Lucene/Solr Meetup and running, attending and speaking at other events on search related topics.

If you have any questions about the above please do contact us. Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

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In any case, it’s clear that Elastic (the company, and that’s hopefully the last time I’ll have to write this!) have a clear strategy for the future – to provide many different commercial options for Elasticsearch and its related projects for as many different use cases as possible. Of course, you can still take the open source route, which we’re helping several clients with at present – I hope to be able to present a case study on this very soon.

Meanwhile, Martin White has identified how a recent book on Elasticsearch describes literally hundreds of features and that ‘The skill lies in knowing which to implement given the nature of the content and the type of query that will be used’ – effective search, as ever, remains a difficult thing to get right, no matter what technology option you choose.

UPDATE: It seems that www.elasticsearch.org, the website for the open source project, is now redirecting to the commercial company website…there is now a new Github page for open source code at https://github.com/elastic

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Firstly, if you’re going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don’t choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn’t anything at all (except snake oil) – it’s a way of attempting to game the algorithms of web search engines. Secondly, at least make some attempt to prevent your experts from just listing the capabilities of their own companies in their answers: in fact one ‘expert’ was actually a set of PR-friendly answers from a company rather than a person, including listing articles about their own software. The expert from Microsoft rather predictably failed to notice the impact of open source on the search market, before going on to put a positive spin on the raft of acquisitions of search companies over the last few years (and it’s certainly not all good, as a recent writedown has proved). Apparently the acquisition of specialist search companies by corporate behemoths will drive innovation – that is, unless that specialist knowledge vanishes into the behemoth’s Big Data strategy, never to be seen again. Woe betide the past customers that have to get used to a brand new pricing, availability and support plan as well.

Luckily it wasn’t all bad – there were some sensible viewpoints on the need for better interaction with the user, the rise of semantic analysis and how the rise of open source is driving out inefficiency in the market – but the article is absolutely peppered with buzzwords (Big Data being the most prevalent, of course) and contains some odd cliches: “I think a generation of people believes the computer should respond like HAL 9000″…didn’t HAL 9000 kill most of the crew and attempt to lock the survivor outside the airlock?

I’m pretty sure this isn’t a feature we want to replicate in an Enterprise Search system.

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Gartner correctly explains that Hadoop isn’t just one project, but an ecosystem comprising an increasing number of open source projects (and some closed source distributions and add-ons). Once you’ve got your Big Data in a HDFS-shaped pile, there are many ways to make sense of it – and one of those is a search engine, so there’s been a lot of work recently trying to add Lucene-powered search engines such as Apache Solr and Elasticsearch into the mix. There’s also been some interesting partnerships.

I’m thus wondering whether this could signal a significant boost to the development of these search projects: there are already Lucene/Solr committers working at Hadoop-flavoured companies who have been working on distributed search and other improvements to scalability. Let’s hope some of the investment cash goes to search!

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Adding some closed-source dusting to a popular open-source distribution is nothing new of course – many companies do it, especially those that are venture funded – it’s a way of building intellectual property while also taking full advantage of the open-source model in terms of user adoption. Other strategies include curated distributions such as that offered by Heliosearch, founded by Solr creator Yonik Seeley and our partner LucidWorks‘ complete packaged search applications. It can help lock potential clients into your version of the software and your vision of the future, although of course they are still free to download the core and go it alone (or engage people like us to help do so), which helps them retain some control.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this strategy develops for Elasticsearch (for the last time, the company). At Flax we’ve also built various additional software components for search applications – but as we have no external investors to please these are freely available as open-source software, including Luwak our fast stored query engine, Clade a taxonomy/classification prototype and even some file format extractors.

The post The closed-source topping on the open-source Elasticsearch appeared first on Flax.

• The Elasticsearch project continues to add features at a prodigious rate during the arms race between it and Apache Solr – this battle can only be good news for end users in our view. We can expect a 1.0 release of Elasticsearch this year and several further major 4.x releases of Solr.
• The Solr world has become slightly more complex as original author Yonik Seeley has left Lucidworks to start his own company, Heliosearch – with its own packaged distribution of Solr. How will Heliosearch contribute to the Solr ecosystem?
• HP Autonomy is a sponsor of the Enterprise Search Europe conference this year, although there’s still some fallout from HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, and little news from the various official investigations into this process. Perhaps this year HP’s overall strategy will become a little clearer.
• The Big Data bandwagon rolls on and more or less every search company now stresses its capabilities in this area for marketing purposes: but how big is Big? It’s not enough just to re-quote IDC’s latest study on how many exobytes everyone is producing these days, the value is in the detail, not the sheer volume: good (and deep) analytics is the key.
• We think there might be some interesting things happening around open source search and bioinformatics soon – watch this space!

The post Time for the crystal ball again… appeared first on Flax.

What we’re seeing here is the further growth of an ecosystem based around what has almost become the default choice for new and migrating search applications. Some clients will want a packaged distribution of Solr, some will be happy to download the source from Apache, some will need help getting started and some will just need help when things get complicated, or support for a running application. We’ve seen all of these requirements and more in the last year.

Next week the largest conference on open source search, Lucene Revolution is held in Dublin, and four of the Flax team are attending. Do let us know if you’d like to meet up – I don’t think there’s going to be a lack of things to talk about!

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Those I’ve spoken to who have attempted to build applications on Hadoop have said that it’s very much a kit of parts rather than an integrated platform, so not that easy to get started with – which has led to the emergence of various vendors providing ‘curated’ distributions and support, much as Lucidworks does for Apache Lucene/Solr. Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR are just some of the best-known of these vendors. With everyone jumping on the BigData bandwagon these days some of these vendors have attracted significant interest and funding.

As you might expect full-text search is often required for these distributed systems and there have been various attempts to bring Hadoop and search closer together. Hortonworks support integration with Elasticsearch, although this currently appears to mean that you can use Hive or Pig to move data from Hadoop on or off a separate Elasticsearch cluster, rather than the search engine running on the cluster itself. Cloudera’s integration of Hadoop with Solr appears to be tighter, with Solr storing its indexes on HDFS directly (perhaps not surprising considering Lucene/Solr committer Mark Miller, who is responsible for most recent SolrCloud development, works for Cloudera). Cloudera even has its own data conditioning framework Flume (yes, it seems we need yet another data conditioning/pipelining solution!) and allows for distributed indexing. MapR have partnered with LucidWorks and integrated LucidWorks Search into their distribution. All these vendors are heavy contributors to Hadoop of course and most also contribute to Lucene/Solr or Elasticsearch.

Since Hadoop has been linked with search from the beginning one can hope that these integration efforts will continue – applications that require distributed search are becoming increasingly common and Hadoop, despite its nature as a kit of parts requiring assembly, is a good foundation to build on.

The post Finding the elephant in the room: open source search & Hadoop grow closer together appeared first on Flax.

• Search isn’t seen as essential. If your accounting software goes down, nobody gets paid: but if the search engine has gradually degraded in accuracy, doesn’t always contain the most recent documents and is generally too hard to use then most of your users will try and find a way around it – they’ll Google for content on the corporate website, dig slowly through the filestores or call up a colleague to ask. Of course, all of this will take time and there’s the risk they won’t find anything useful (or worse, find something inaccurate or out-of-date), but time is only money, surely?
• The magic has gone. The sharp suited salesman who told you all the magical things your search engine could do – it could understand concepts, human language and the meaning of life – is a distant memory. Somehow those magical features were never implemented, perhaps the unexpected extra cost put you off (surely the magic came as standard? No?). You’ve also probably turned off a lot of the clever features of your engine as either no-one could understand how to use them, or they affected performance so much that search results took minutes to appear.
• Upgrading search is hard and expensive. Small changes to the existing engine can cost huge consultancy fees but if you change supplier, you’ll have a whole new team of salesmen to meet, lots more buzzwords to learn, there’s expensive new license fees to pay, you’ll also have to overhaul your content management system, your metadata, your front ends…better to leave everything alone, surely?

There are search engines out there, chugging away quietly behind a corporate firewall, whose antiquity would astonish. Any chance of a support contract has long gone as the supplier would prefer it if you upgraded to their latest-and-greatest version – that’s if the supplier still exists at all. However there is always a way to upgrade that reduces the risk and cost – an incremental, agile and open-source based approach will prevent future lock-in to a single supplier and give you more control of the code your search engine depends on. Recently we’ve used this approach to help clients successfully upgrade search applications based on dtSearch, FAST ESP and Oracle and in the near future we’ll be doing the same for clients with several other well-known engines – and a few lost in the mists of time!

The post Three reasons why your search may be prehistoric appeared first on Flax.

We’ve talked to a number of clients over the last month or so who are determined to move away from Autonomy IDOL itself, citing reasons such as a lack of ownership of code (so even tiny changes to a user interface need to be carried out by expensive consultants), scaling being difficult and expensive, and indifferent support even after the HP acquisition. As I wrote at the time moving from one closed-source technology to another doesn’t really reduce any risk that your supplier will change their roadmap, prices or corporate strategy to your disadvantage.

Perhaps it’s time to cut the strings and take control of your search.

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