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
Last Thursday I spent the day at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event, run by their Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Unlike some events I could mention, this isn't a forum for sales pitches, over-inflated claims or business speak - just some great presentations on all aspects of search and some lively networking or discussion. It's one of my favourite events of t...Continue reading
The diary is beginning to fill up - here are a few events we'll be involved with over the next few months. Firstly we're running another Cambridge Search Meetup on October 17th - this is an informal gathering of people interested in search, we have one great talk already on 'Making search accessible to low cost apps' and another to be confirmed, plus snacks, beer and even some live music afterwards. If you're in ...Continue reading
We're happy to announce we've just finished a successful project for a division of the Australian Associated Press to replace a closed source search engine with a considerably more powerful open source solution. You can read the press release here. As our client had a large investment in stored searches (which repr...Continue reading
We've been working on a client project where we needed to replace the dtSearch closed source search engine, which doesn't perform that well at scale in this case. As the client has significant investment in stored queries (it's for a monitoring application) they were keen that the new engine spoke exactly the same query language as the old - so we've built a version of Apache Lucene to replace dtSearch. There are a ...Continue reading
We're working with a number of clients on media monitoring solutions, which are a special case of search application (we've worked on this previously for Durrants). In standard search, you apply a single query to a large amount of documents, expecting to get a ranked list of documents that match your query as a result. However in media monitoring you need to ...Continue reading
Media monitoring is not a traditional search application: for a start, instead of searching a large number of documents with a single query, a media monitoring application must search every incoming news story with potentially thousands of queries, searching for words and terms relevant to client requirements. This can be difficult to scale, especially when accuracy must be maintained - a client won't be happy if their media monitors miss relevant stories or send them news that isn't relevant. ...Continue reading
