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
We're sometimes asked by clients to examine not just their technical implementation of search, but also the wider picture: how search functionality is exposed to users, how it compares to competitors' websites and best practice. This process usually takes us ten days to two weeks and results in a highly detailed report with clear recommendations for improvement. This process is slightly different each time, but usually includes the following steps, shown with some examples of questions we mig...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 attended Search Solutions, one of my favourite annual events where all aspects of search are covered from web to intranet to enterprise. The first speaker Sebastian Blohm from Microsoft spoke about a new personalised Clutter folder for email and how his team had first devel...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
After our two successful hackdays, it was on to the main event of the week and the largest open source search event of the year. In between catching up with other Lucene/Solr folks on the first day I enjoyed Chris 'Hossman' Hostetter's talk on Hidden Gems of Apache Sol...Continue reading
To mark Flax's 15th anniversary we ran two Lucene Hackdays recently, in London and Continue reading
