Quepid & Flax – if you’re not testing your search, you’re doing it wrong!

Earlier this year an e-commerce company asked us to look into how they should improve how they tested their website search queries. A relatively simple task you might think - but the company concerned has a turnover of over a billion pounds with at least half of this via digital channels, so measuring how well search works is essential to preserve revenue. Like (I suspect) many others, they were recording the results of thousands of test searches, carried out manually by their s...Continue reading

Elasticon London 2015 – more products, more scale, more users!

Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic. Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...Continue reading

Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 2

Not such an early start for me for Day 2 (I'd been up pretty late running the Meetup the night before) but I did manage to catch the very end of Findwise's presentation on their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. This is a unique and valuable benchmark of the state of enterprise search - I urge you to read it, if for no oth...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 1

This year's Enterprise Search Europe started early for me - I had been invited to give the opening keynote, so I made sure I arrived early enough to make sure my laptop would play nicely with the projector, always a worry! The keynote was well recieved and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about Continue reading

Why building an open source search team is hard – and how we can help

A common complaint from our clients is how difficult it is to find staff with experience of search applications and in particular Apache Lucene/Solr or Elasticsearch. With the explosive growth of open source search over the last few years, there simply aren't enough people on the market with the right skills and...Continue reading

Elasticsearch Meetup – Spark, postcodes and Couchbase

Three speakers for this month's Elasticsearch Meetup (slides now up), kindly hosted by JustEat's technical department. Neil Andrassy kicked us off with a talk about how TheFilter (which you may know counts Peter Gabriel as an investor) use Apache Spark to ...Continue reading