I finally made it to a London Elastic Meetup again after missing a few of the recent events: this time Rightmove were the hosts and the first speakers. They described how they had used Elasticsearch Percolator to run 3.5 million stored searches on new property listings as part of an overall migration from the Exalead search engine and Oracle database to a new stack bas...Continue reading
Bloomberg kindly hosted the London Lucene/Solr Meetup last night and we were lucky enough to have two excellent speakers for the thirty or so attendees. Kriegler kicked off with a talk about the
A small crowd for this month's London Lucene/Solr Meetup, kindly hosted by Barclays in their sumptuous Canary Wharf offices. I introduced the Meetup and spoke briefly on how Flax is currently looking for team members (want to work on a variety of cutting-edge open source search projects in the UK and abroad? Get in touch!) before introducing Flax's Alan Woodwar...Continue reading
Back in October at our London Lucene Hackday Flax's Alan Woodward started to write Marple, a new open source tool for inspecting Lucene indexes. Since then we have made nearly 240 commits to the Marple GitHub repository, and are now happy to announce its first release.Continue reading
Last week we ran a hackday for Full Fact, hosted by Facebook in their London office. We had planned to gather a room full of search experts from our London Lucene/Solr Meetup and around twenty people attended from a range of companies including Bloomberg, Alfresc...Continue reading
It won't have escaped your notice that factchecking is very much in the news recently due to last year's political upheavals in both the US and UK and the suspected influence of fake news on voters. Both traditional and social media organisations are making efforts in this area; examples include Channel 4 and Faceboo...Continue reading
Last week I spoke at the Big Data London conference, a very busy event with several thousand people attending. My session was on using open source search to make sense of Big Data - you can get slides here. In the evening we ran another Continue reading
To mark Flax's 15th anniversary we ran two Lucene Hackdays recently, in London and Continue reading
We're always keen to get more people involved in the Lucene search community - there's always lots to do, from deep hacking of the core code, to testing with different frameworks and clients, to creating documentation and examples. It's also just over fifteen years since Tom Mortimer and I founded Flax and we thought we should mark this birthday with some kind of event! So I'm thus very happy to announce we'll be involved in three Lucene hackday events over the next two months: Firstly, Continue reading
Last night the London Lucene Solr Meetup was hosted by Elsevier in their Finsbury Square offices. Our first speaker was Martin White, expert consultant, author of many books about enterprise search and intranets and visiting professor at the University of Sheffield (oh, and Fl...Continue reading
