We have some news! From February 1st 2019 Flax's Managing Director Charlie Hull will be joining OpenSource Connections (OSC), Flax's long-standing US partner, as a senior Managing Consultant. Charlie will manage a new UK division of OSC who will also acquire some of Flax's assets and brands. OSC are a highly regarded organisation in the world of search and relevance, wrote the seminal book Continue reading
I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading
I've just seen an article titled Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search which presents a list of somewhat contradictory opinions. I'm afraid I have some serious issues with the experts chosen and the undeniably blinkered views some of them have presented. Firstly, if you're going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don't choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn't anything at ...Continue reading
The last few weeks have seen a rush of investment in companies that offer Hadoop-powered Big Data platforms - the most recent being Intel's investment in Cloudera, but Hortonworks has also snorted up $100m. Gartner Continue reading
Today Elasticsearch (the company, not the software) announced their first commercial, closed-source product, a monitoring plugin for Elasticsearch (the software, not the company - yes I know this is confusing, one might suspect...Continue reading
It's always fun to make predictions about the future, especially as one can be pretty sure to be proved wrong in interesting ways. At the start of 2014 we at Flax are looking forward to another year of building open source search and we already have some great client projects in progress that we'll shortly be able to talk about, but what else might be happening this year? Here's some points to note:
This morning I was told about the launch of a new US-based search company, Heliosearch, founded by the creator of Apache Solr, Yonik Seeley. It seems the landscape of open source search and in particular Solr is changing again - Heliosearch are planning their own 'certified' distribution of Solr plus a raft of support, consulting and services. In the meantime, the comp...Continue reading
I've been lucky enough to attend two talks on Hadoop in the last few weeks which has made me take a closer look at this technology. In case you didn't know, Hadoop is an Apache top level open source project comprising a framework for distributed computing and storage, originally created by Doug Cutting (also the creator of Apache Lucene) while at Yahoo! in 2005. Distributed computing is carried out using Continue reading
ArnoldIT wondered today why we were bothering to announce an upgrade to the venerable dtSearch engine, when they "weren’t aware of too many people still using that software". Perhaps it's time for a quick reality check here - we regularly see clients with search engines that many would consider prehistoric still in active use. Here's some reasons why that might be so:
I notice this morning that Autonomy have created a rescue program for those unhappy with Microsoft's decision to offer FAST search only as part of Sharepoint - slightly late to the party, considering this had been long predicted. Last year it was Autonomy...Continue reading
