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
Tag Archives: enterprise search
Elastic acquires Swiftype and broadens its offering to include enterprise search
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
Announcing our new book, Searching the Enterprise
For the last year or so I've been working with Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex on a long-form journal article on enterprise search - although at 156 pages this is more of a book than a journal. Released as part of the Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval series by Now Publishing, the b...Continue reading
A lack of cognition and some fresh FUD from Forrester
Last night the estimable Martin White, intranet and enterprise search expert and author of many books on the subject, flagged up two surprising articles from Forrester who have declared that Cognitive Search (we'll define this using their own terms in...Continue reading
London Lucene Solr Meetup – Enterprising attitudes to open source search & query completion strategies
Last night the London Lucene Solr Meetup was hosted by Elsevier in their Finsbury Square offices. Our first speaker was Martin White, expert consultant, author of many books about enterprise search and intranets and visiting professor at the University of Sheffield (oh, and Fl...Continue reading
How to get started on improving Site Search Relevancy
A series of blogs by Karen Renshaw on improving site search:
- How to get started on improving Site Search Relevancy
- A suggested approach to running a Site Search Tuning Workshop
- Auditing your site search performance
- Continue reading
Elasticsearch for Westcoast – why search is never simple!
The four types of open source search project
As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories!
When bad search hurts: finding that elusive ROI
One thing I've noticed from many years attending search conferences is that the return on investment (ROI) in search technology is hard to calculate: this is particularly difficult when considering intranet and/or enterprise search, as users can usually find another way to answer their question. In most cases, some slightly tired numbers are tro...Continue reading
IntraTeam 2015 – a brief visit
Last week I dropped in on the IntraTeam 2015 conference in Copenhagen, an event focused on intranets with some content on enterprise search. After a rather pleasant evening of Thai food and networking I attended the last day of the event. The keynote speaker was Dave Snowden, who has an amusing and rather curmudgeonly style of presentation, making sure to note the previous presenters he'd disagreed with for their over-reliance on simplistic concepts of k...Continue reading