Worth the wait – Apache Kafka hits 1.0 release
We've known about Apache Kafka for several years now - we first encountered it when we developed a prototype streaming Boolean search engine for media monitoring with our own library Luwak. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform with some simple but powerful concepts - everything it deals with is a stream ...Continue reading
Elastic London Meetup: Rightmove & Signal Media and a new free security plugin for Elasticsearch
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
A fabulous FactHack for Full Fact
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
Out with the old – and in with the new Lucene query parser?
Over the years we've dealt with quite a few migration projects where the query syntax of the client's existing search engine must be preserved. This might be because other systems (or users) depend on it, or a large number of stored expressions exist and it is difficult or uneconomic to translate them all by hand. Our usual approach is to write a query parser, which understands the current syntax but creates a Continue reading
Helping Bloomberg build a real-time news search engine with Luwak
Bloomberg is one of the world's leading providers of financial news via the Bloomberg Terminal, an almost ubiquitous presence on the desks of finance professionals. As you might expect their systems heavily depend on effective search and over the last few years they have become increasingly involved in the open source community, sponsoring events such as Lucene Revolution and also he...Continue reading
London Text Analytics Meetup – Making sense of text with Lumi, Signal & Bloomberg
This month's London Text Analytics Meetup, hosted by Bloomberg in their spectacular Finsbury Square offices, was only the second such event this year, but crammed in three great talks and attracted a wide range of people from both academia and business. We started with Gabriella Kazai o...Continue reading
Out and about in search & monitoring – Autumn 2015
It's been a very busy few months for events - so busy that it's quite a relief to be back in the office! Back in late November I travelled to Vienna to speak at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress with our client Infomedia about how we've helped them to migrate their media monitoring platform from the elderly, unsupported and hard to scale Continue reading
FIBEP WMIC 2015 – Open source search for media monitoring with Solr
Luwak 1.3.0 released
The latest version of Luwak, our open-source streaming query engine, has been released on the Sonatype Nexus repository and will be making its way to Maven Central in the next few hours. Here's a summary of the new features and improvements we've made: Batch processing I...Continue reading
