Who we are

Charlie Hull

Charlie Hull, a founder of Flax, keeps a strategic view on developments in the search industry, and is in demand as a speaker at conferences across the world. Charlie writes and comments regularly on search issues and runs several networking groups. Charlie is the Managing Director of Flax. (more…)

Matt Pearce

Matt Pearce worked at the Press Association, leading digital agency netXtra and at Proquest before joining the Flax team, where he has worked on a document management system, upgrading a news search application, indexing ontologies and on product search. (more…)

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We hired Flax to help us with switching out our old commercial search engine with a new Solr-based platform. This was a monumental task, also involving translating many thousands of old, complicated stored queries into…

Flax have been instrumental in helping us achieve more relevant results across our various music search platforms. Since working with them we are a huge leap forward from where we were, they have been great…

'The new search engine indexes all our documents quickly and gives our users search results in less than a second. Flax’s long experience and expert knowledge of enterprise search has been invaluable – they had…

We are a small law firm in Woodland, California. While we try to create and maintain directory structures that make document access as painless as possible, inevitably we need to find documents by their content…

We have worked with Flax on a number of occasions to give my team support in the specialist area of search technology. Flax helped us install and customise an open source search engine to help…

We needed a new search engine to give our users better results when searching our catalogue of 250,000 products; we knew that Elasticsearch was the solution for us but complicated integrations into our site and…

'Eagle has been fortunate to work with Flax on a number of occasions. Their deep knowledge and expertise in search has been invaluable, and their experience of working on real-world projects brings significant advantages. As…

Flax came into our search-overhaul project at a crucial moment, when most approaches we'd tried had turned out to be dead ends. After one day we had a new direction we hadn't considered and proof…

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Latest Case Study

Asking the right questions in a Search Audit

We’re often asked to review how our clients use search technology, both open and closed source (although we specialise in the former, we’ve also encountered most of the commercial search engines over the last 16 years). One common mistake is to assume that search is purely a technical problem, and that all issues can be resolved by writing software and changing configurations, or worse by throwing away the old engine and replacing it with a new one at huge expense. More

Latest White Paper

Whitepaper – Why you should be considering open source search

I’ve uploaded a whitepaper I wrote a short while ago : “In these rapidly changing times we don’t know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it’s important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data … More

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