We're finding more and more clients interested in the advantages of a powerful open source enterprise search engine. Thus, we're looking at expanding the team - can you help?...Continue reading
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Enterprise search – for free
We recently helped a small marine consultancy, running a Windows network, implement a completely free enterprise search solution. Even SMEs are now finding it hard to keep on top of the information they produce, and there are few low-cost options for searching their documents. Read the case study here (PDF). ...Continue reading
Xapian compared
Vik Singh has been comparing various open source solutions for search. He only spent a weekend performing the comparison, which is probably not enough time to get any search software performing at its best, and his results reflect this. Xapian was marked down for being slow at indexing (he says 5x slower than SQLite - but then again, SQLite isn't a search engine, it's a RDBMS, and...Continue reading
Perl client for Flax Search Server
Flax Search Server now has a Perl client, thanks to the guys at Cognidox, who have blogged about why they needed to improve the search facility for their powerful document management system....Continue reading
Python and Flax presentation
My colleague Richard Boulton will be presenting at Europython in Birmingham, U.K. next week, specifically at 15.30 on Tuesday 30th June - an abstract is available. He'll be talking about Xapian, Xappy and Flax, and showing examples of these in action including one using a Django integration layer....Continue reading
Please don't compete!
Microsoft have been asking open source companies not to compete on cost, but rather on value, according to ZDNet. Unfortunately the response to this hasn't exactly been positive, as CNET reports. I doubt many open source vendors will be taking much notice of what Microsoft would like them to do, and suspect they wil...Continue reading
More on performance metrics
Anurag Goel recently carried out a comparitive test of Xapian/Flax and Lucene/Solr. Some interesting results here: it seems Lucene is faster at building indexes, but Xapian is faster and possibly more accurate at searching. We can expect some further speed improvements over the next few months as a new, more compact backend to Xapian is released. By the way, the article mentions Xappy: this is a Python interface to Xapian that is a major part of our Flax enterprise search platform. You can ge...Continue reading
Performance metrics
Stephen Arnold recently posted some rather impressive performance figures for Autonomy's IDOL search engine. This kind of data is all very well, but without independent testing and more detail it's hard to know how these figures apply to the real world. So here's an idea. Why not create an openly available collection of test data, a set of searches and a set of conditions, then compare the performance of the various av...Continue reading
