Matt Pearce writes: We have been working with a client who needs to search for documents based on location, either using a single point or (sometimes very) complex polygons. They supplied the location data in WKT format which we assumed we could feed directly into our search engine (in this case Solr) without any modifications being necessary. Then we started testing the location se...Continue reading
Staying over in London due to the aforementioned tube strike proved to be a good idea and a large fried breakfast an even better one, so I arrived at the second day of the conference right on time and ready for the second day's keynote by Jeff Fried of BA Insight and Professor Elaine Toms from Sheffield University, who hadn't met before the event but spoke in turn on the Future of Search. Jeff's expert and challenging view included s...Continue reading
At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading
Matt Pearce writes: We recently released UKMP, a search application built on work done on last year's Enterprise Search hack day. This presents the tweets of UK Members of Parliament with search options including filtering by party, retweet and favourite count, and entities (people, locations a...Continue reading
We’ve been working internally on a document encapsulating how we build (and recommend others should build) search applications based on Apache Solr, probably the most popular open source search engine library. As an early Christmas present we’re releasing these as a two part series – if you have any feedback we’d welcome comments! Here's the second part, you can also read the Continue reading
A slow start to the day, possibly due to the aftereffects of the conference party the night before, but the stadium was still buzzing. I went to Rafal Kuć's talk on SolrCloud which is becoming the standard way to build scalable Solr installations (we have two projects underway that use it). The shard splitting features in recent releases of Solr were interesting - previous...Continue reading
I visited the London Elasticsearch User Groups' meetup last night for the first time, in the rather splendid HQ of Skills Matter just down from Old Street - the venue had a great buzz. The first speaker was Chris Simpson from Continue reading
A customer of ours has a potential search application which requires (largely for reasons of performance) the ability to update specific individual fields of Apache Lucene documents. This is not the first time that someone has asked for this functionality. However, until now, it has been impossible to change field values in a Lucene document without re-indexing the...Continue reading
While working on a customer project recently we found a very large field that was stored unnecessarily in the Lucene index, taking up a lot of space. As it would have taken a very long time to re-index (there are tens of millions of complex documents in this case) we looked for a way to remove the stored field in-place. There's an interesting set of slides from last year's Apache Lucene Eurocon which discuss this kind of Lucene index pos...Continue reading
Last year my colleague Tom Mortimer talked about indexing security information within an open source enterprise search application, and we're happy to announce more details of the project. Our client is an international radio supplier, who had considered both closed source products and search appliances, but chose open source for greater flexibility and the much lower cost of scaling...Continue reading
