Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? Continue reading
Tag Archives: e-commerce
Catching MICES – a focus on e-commerce search
The second event I attended in Berlin last week was the Mix Camp on e-commerce search (MICES), a small and focused event now in its second year and kindly hosted by Mytoys at their offices. Slides for the talks are available here and I hope videos will appear soon. The first talk was given ...Continue reading
Boosts Considered Harmful – adventures with badly configured search
During a recent client visit we encountered a common problem in search - over-application of 'boosts', which can be used to weight the influence of matches in one particular field. For example, you might sensibly use this to make results that match a query on their title field come higher in search results. However in this case we saw huge boost values used (numbers in the hundreds) which were probably swamping everything else - and it wasn't at all clear where the values had come from, be it ex...Continue reading
Can we fix your Solr or Elasticsearch system in a single day?
Here at Flax, we're often called in to take a look at existing Apache Solr or Elasticsearch search applications, to suggest improvements, tune-ups or enhancements. It's impossible for us to know ahead of time what we might find - out-of-date versions of the software, slow performance on either (or both) the indexing or search side of the application ...Continue reading
Measuring search relevance scores
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
Developing ongoing search tuning processes
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
Auditing your site search performance
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
A suggested approach to running a Site Search Tuning Workshop
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
XJoin for Solr, part 2: a click-through example
In my last blog post, I demonstrated how to set up and configure Solr to use the new XJoin search components we've developed for the BioSolr project, using an example from an e-commerce setting. This time, I'll show...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