However before then I’ll be at speaking at a few events. At the end of this month I’ll be in Copenhagen to speak on Keeping Search Relevant in a Digital Workplace at the Intrateam conference. This is a fantastic conference on intranets and I’m looking forward to speaking for the second time and joining a very august gathering of speakers. I’m also glad to be returning to both City University and the University of Essex during February and March to talk to students about working in search and information retrieval

In April I’ll be returning to the US for OSC’s Haystack search relevance conference, which was my favourite event of last year – I liked it so much I brought it to London that October. This year we have a fantastic lineup of talks from speakers representing organisations including LexisNexis, Wikimedia Foundation, Eventbrite and Yelp, a new and more capacious venue in downtown Charlottesville, three training options before the main conference (Think Like A Relevance Engineer for Elasticsearch and Solr, and Learning to Rank) and of course the chance to meet, chat with and get to know some of the best search people in the business. Earlybird tickets are available until the end of February and are already selling well, so make your plans to join us soon!

It’s already shaping up to be a busy year – so do keep an eye on this blog and my new home at www.opensourceconnections.com/blog for further news, and if you’d like to know how OSC can help you empower your search team get in touch.

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Over the last year or so we’ve seen the emergence of a new profession dedicated to improving how search systems present information to users – Relevance Engineering. Importantly this covers not just the technical aspects of search, but the business aspects – understanding the why as much as the how. Relevance engineers understand that search tuning is a multifaceted problem and there are no magic bullets (or magic AI robots) that will do all the work for you. I’ve started to write about relevance engineering recently to try and define what it means.

One of my favourite events last year was the first Haystack conference run by our partners Open Source Connections, which brought together both experienced relevance engineers and those new to the profession. It was friendly, informal, focused and informative. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that by the second day I was already thinking about how to bring the event to Europe – which we did successfully in October.

I’m very happy to say that Haystack is back in April 2019 and the Call for Papers is open until January 9th. If you’ve got an exciting relevance project or idea to talk about please do submit it. See you there!

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My only regret was how little time I had personally to catch up with the attendees, many of whom were from Flax clients past and present – I must have had 20 or 30 very brief chats during the day! Luckily a few of us went on for a drink afterwards and eventually a curry nearby. It was a very long day but from the feedback we’ve recieved so far a very successful one. We hope to make this a regular event on the calendar.

Thanks to all who made the event possible, our speakers and everyone who came – the slides are now available on the event website.

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Earlier in the year I attended Haystack in Charlottesville, one of my favourite search conferences ever – and almost immediately began to think about whether we could run a similar event here in Europe. Although we’ve only had a few months I’m very happy to say we’ve managed to pull together a high-quality programme of talks for our first Haystack Europe event, to be held in London on October 2nd. The event is focused on search relevance from both a business and a technical perspective and we have speakers from global retailers and by specialist consultants and authors. Tickets are already selling well and we have limited space, so I would encourage you to register as soon as you can (Haystack USA sold out even after the capacity was increased). We’re running the event in partnership with Open Source Connections.

The next week we’re running a Lucene Hackday on October 9th as part of our London Lucene/Solr Meetup programme. Building on previous successful events, this is a day of hacking on the Apache Lucene search engine and associated software such as Apache Solr and Elasticsearch. You can read up on what we achieved at our last event a couple of years ago – again, space is limited, so sign up soon to this free event (huge thanks to Mimecast for providing the venue and to Elastic for sponsoring drinks and food for an evening get-together afterwards). Bring a laptop and your ideas (and do comment on the event page if you have any suggestions for what we should work on).

We’ll be flying to Montreal soon afterwards to attend the Activate conference (run by our partners Lucidworks) and while we’re there we’ll host another free Lucene Hackday on October 15th. Again, this would not be possible without sponsorship and so thanks must go to Netgovern, SearchStax and One More Cloud. Remember to tell us your ideas in the comments.

So that’s three weeks of excellent search events – see you there!

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Doug Turnbull of Open Source Connections gave the keynote presentation which led on the idea that we need more open source tools and methods for tuning relevance, including those to gather search analytics. He noted how the Learning to Rank plugins recently developed for both Solr and Elasticsearch have provided commoditized capabilities previously only described by academia and how we also need to build a cohesive community around search relevance. As it turned out, this conference did in my view signal the birth of that community.

Next up was Peter Fries who talked about a business-friendly approach to search quality, a subject close to my heart as I regularly have to discuss relevance tuning with non-technical staff. Peter described how search quality is often presented to business teams as mysterious and ‘not for them’ – without convincing these people of the value of search tuning we will fail to take account of business-related factors (and we’re also unlikely to get full buy-in for a relevance tuning project). He went on to say how it is important to include the marketing and management mindsets in this process and a method for search tuning involving feedback loops and an ‘iron triangle’ of measurement, data and optimisation. This was a very useful talk.

I then went to hear Chao Han of Lucidworks demonstrate how their product Fusion App Studio allows one to capture various signals and use these for ‘head and tail analysis’ – looking not just at the ‘head’ of popular, often-clicked results but those in the ‘tail’ that attract few clicks, possibly due to problems such as mis-spellings. Interestingly this approach allows automatic tail query rewriting – an example might be spotting a colour word such as ‘red’ in the query and rewriting this into a field query of colour:red. This was a popular talk although the presenter was a little mysterious about the exact methodology used, perhaps unsurprisingly as Fusion is a commercial product.

After a tasty Mexican-themed lunch I took a short break for some meetings, so missed the next set of talks. I then went to Elizabeth Haubert’s talk on Click Analytics. She began with a description of the venerable TREC conference (now in its 27th year!) which has evaluated relevance judgements and how these methods might be applied to real-world situations. For example, the TREC evaluations have shown that how relevance tests are assessed is as important as the tests themselves – the assessors are effectively also users of the system under test. She recommended calbrating both the rankings to a tester and the tester to the rankings, and to create a story around each test to put it in context and to help with disambiguation.

We finished the day with some lightning talks, sadly I didn’t take notes on these but check out Sujit’s aforementioned blog for more information. I do remember Tom Burgmans’ visualisation tool for Solr’s Explain debug feature which I’m very much looking forward to seeing as open source. The evening continued with a conference dinner nearby and some excellent local craft beer.

I’ll be covering the second day next.

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I don’t think I’ve been to any other conference with such a strong sense of community or such a high quality of presentations. It was particularly refreshing to be among a group of people with such a level of search expertise and experience that at no point did anything have to be ‘dumbed down’ or over-explained. The attendee list included open source committers from projects including Apache Lucene/Solr and Apache Tika, experts in commercial search, authors of books I’ve long regarded as essential for anyone working in this field, independent consultants and those working for huge global companies. The talks were well programmed, ran exactly to schedule and covered cutting-edge topics. Between these talks the networking was relaxed and friendly and I had a chance to get to know several people in real life that I’ve previously only connected with online.

I think this conference may also have signalled the birth of a new profession of “relevance engineer” – someone who can understand both the business and technical aspects of search relevance, work with a variety of underlying search engines and expertly use the correct tools for the job to drive a continuing process of search quality improvement. Personally, I learnt a huge amount of useful information, made connections with many others in our field and have pages of notes to follow up on.

Last but no means least is to extend my personal thanks to all at OSC who created, planned and ran the event – as a veteran of many events in both technical and non-technical fields I understand very well how much work goes into them, especially if you’re not an event planner by profession! You opened your doors to us and made us all feel very welcome and you all worked extremely hard to make this one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended.

More to follow on day 1 and day 2 soon.

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