This week's London Lucene/Solr Meetup was hosted by asset management company BlackRock who also provided our first speakers. BlackRock manages an astonishing $4.7 trillion in assets (that's more than the GDP of Germany) and operates 90 different websites with around 250,000 content items, so a good and accurate website search engine is essenti...Continue reading
This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Alan Woodward of Flax and Martin Kleppmann at FOSDEM 2015. It was originally published on the Confluent blog. ...Continue reading
Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading
Most search applications work by indexing a relatively stable collection of documents and then allowing users to perform ad-hoc searches to retrieve relevant documents. However, in some cases it is useful to turn this model on its head, and match individual documents against a collection of saved queries. I shall refer to this model as "streamed search". One example of streamed search is in media monitoring. The monitoring agency's ...Continue reading
Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading
As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories!
I'm just back from Singapore: my first visit to this amazing, dynamic and everchanging city-state, at the kind invitation of Patrick Lambe, to speak at the first Innovations in Knowledge Organisation conference. I think this was probably one of the best organised and most interesting events I've attended in the last few years. The event started with an enthusiastic ...Continue reading
Last week Doug Turnbull of US-based Open Source Connections visited the UK and spoke at our Meetup. His first talk was on Search Relevancy, an area that we often deal with at Flax: how to tune a search engine to give results that our clients deem relevant, without affecting the results for other queries. Using a ...Continue reading
