Defining relevance engineering part 4: tools

Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? In this series of blog posts I'll try to explain what I see as aContinue reading

How to build a search relevance team

We've spent a lot of time working with clients who recognise that their search engine isn't delivering relevant results to users. Often this is seen as solely a technical problem, which can be resolved simply by changing query parameters or the search engine configuration - but technical teams need clear direction on why a result should or should not appear at a certain position, not just request for general relevance improvements. It's thus important to consider relevance as...Continue reading

Setting up your first Quepid test case

Quepid is an innovative tool from our partners Open Source Connections, which allows you to bridge the gap between content owners (who really know what's in your search index and how people might search for it) and search developers (who can tweak the search engine to improve relevance, given some examples of 'good' and 'bad' results for a query). We're increasingly using it in...Continue reading

Flax Newsletter November 2015

In this month's Flax Newsletter:

  • Building an open source search team is hard - let us help with training & mentoring on Solr and Elasticsearch
  • RS Components: Flax & Quepid help us to make "crucial" data driven decisions for tuning search
  • 40x faster indexing with Elasticsearch for Hadoop - over a gigabyte per second!
...Continue reading

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