Choosing between Elasticsearch and Solr

One of the questions we're asked all the time is which of the two most popular open source search engines is best for a particular use case - and the answer is always 'it depends'. Broadly speaking, Apache Lucene/Solr and Elasticsearch are very similar in terms of features and performance. If you've already chosen one of them, there's very few reasons to incur the inevitable extra work of switching to the other. However if you're still not sure which to choose, read on. Solr,...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

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

Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, Washington DC

Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I'd been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I'll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about me...Continue reading

Searching for IP addresses in text with Elasticsearch

We recently implemented a search solution for a customer using Elasticsearch. Most of their requirements were fairly standard, however they also wanted to be able to search for IP addresses embedded in the document text, using a flexible and precise search syntax, e.g. given the following document fragment:

    ... the API can be accessed at 167.87.3.201 on port 8700 ...

the following searches should all find the document:

...Continue reading

The trouble with tabbing: editing rich text on the Web

Matt Pearce, who joined the Flax team earlier this year, writes: A recent client wished to convert documents to and from Microsoft Office formats, using a web form as an intermediate step for editing the content. The documents were read in, imported to a Solr search engine, and could then be searched over, cloned, edited and transformed in batches, before being exported to Office once more. The cont...Continue reading