Search Insights 2018 – a free, independent report on search

Posted on by
Reply

Over the last 17 years of running Flax I've met many people who loudly profess to be experts in various aspects of the search business. Some have a new product or service to sell, that promises to change the game forever; quite often this turns out to be snake oil or simply a new name for an old solution. Others seem to have arrived suddenly, fully-fledged, enthusiastic to convince us old hands that everything will be different now if we all sign up to their new idea. There's also a small gro...Continue reading

When even the commercial vendors are using it, has open source search won?

Posted on by
Reply

There have been some interesting announcements recently which may point to an increasing realisation amongst commercial search firms that an open source model is an essential advantage in today's search market. Coveo have announced that their enterprise search engine can run on an Elasticsearch core, an interesting move for a previously decidedly closed source company. BA Insight, who have previou...Continue reading

No, Elastic X-Pack is not going to be open source – according to Elastic themselves

Posted on by
2

Elastic are the company founded by the creator of Elasticsearch, Shay Banon. At this time of year they have their annual Elasticon conference in San Francisco and as you might expect a lot of announcements are made during the week of the conference. The major ones to appear this time are that Swiftype, which Elastic acquired last year, has reappeared as Elastic Site Search and that Elastic are opening the code for their commercial X-Pack features. More

Asking the right questions in a Search Audit

Posted on by
Reply

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

London Lucene/Solr Meetup – Java 9 & 1 Beeelion Documents with Alfresco

Posted on by
Reply

This time Pivotal were our kind hosts for the London Lucene/Solr Meetup, providing a range of goodies including some frankly enormous pizzas - thanks Costas and colleagues, we couldn't have done it without you! Our first talk was from Uwe Schindler, Lucene committer, who started with...Continue reading

Inspiring students to work in Open Source Search

Posted on by
Reply

I've recently been asked to join the Industrial Advisory Board for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex and will be talking to students there on Monday 5th February, repeating a similar talk I did last year. The subject is 'Working in Open Source Search' and I'll describe how we founded Flax back in 2001, how we've built, tuned and implemented open source search engines and some of the client projects we've worked on. It's been a fascinating journe...Continue reading

Search Solutions 2017 review

Posted on by
Reply

Search Solutions is one of my favourite search events of the year - small, focused and varied, with presentations from both the largest and smallest players in the world of search, drawn from both industry and academia. This year's event started with Edgar Meij of Bloomberg, who Flax have helped in the past with their larg...Continue reading

Elastic acquires Swiftype and broadens its offering to include enterprise search

Posted on by
Reply

The news today that Elastic (the company behind the open source Elasticsearch software) has acquired Swiftype will have surprised a few people, even though Elastic has already acquired a good number of other companies. Swiftype have a couple of products that deliver cloud-based site and enterprise search and under the hood, all of this is built on Elasticsearch.  Swiftype are part of a new ...Continue reading