It's looking like a busy Autumn for search events - first, I'm presenting at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014 in Washington DC on November 5th, talking about 'Turning Search Upside Down with open source software'. I'll be describing how we've replaced various underperforming, big name closed source search engines with faster & more scalable open ...Continue reading
Last Friday we hosted a hackday featuring Elasticsearch in Cambridge, following a similar event last year focused on Apache Lucene/Solr. Around 20 people attended from organisations working in sectors including analytics, digital music, bioinformatics and e-commerce, and all the Flax team were there as well. We started wi...Continue reading
Last night I joined a good-sized crowd at a venue on Hoxton Square for some talks on Elasticsearch - this Meetup group is very popular and always attracts a good proportion of people new to the world of search, as well as some familiar faces. I started with a quick announcement of our own Elasticsearch hackday in a few weeks ti...Continue reading
We were lucky enough to have two speakers from Cambridge text mining company Linguamatics at last night's Meetup. Robin Newton kicked us off with an amusing and idiosyncratic view of the uses and mis-uses of search - starting with the problem that when you have text search software, every problem can look like search might solve it. He gave an example of his recent search for a new job: although matching ...Continue reading
A sunny evening last night for the latest Cambridge Search Meetup, which featured a couple of talks from Datastax on the highly scalable NoSQL database Apache Cassandra and how it is integrated with Apache Lucene/Solr. Continue reading
Staying over in London due to the aforementioned tube strike proved to be a good idea and a large fried breakfast an even better one, so I arrived at the second day of the conference right on time and ready for the second day's keynote by Jeff Fried of BA Insight and Professor Elaine Toms from Sheffield University, who hadn't met before the event but spoke in turn on the Future of Search. Jeff's expert and challenging view included s...Continue reading
This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading
I spent yesterday afternoon at UCL for ISKO UK's event on Taming the News Beast - I'm not sure if we found out how to tame it but we certainly heard how to festoon it with metadata and lock it up in a nice secure ontology. There were around 90 people attending from news, content, technology and academic organisations, including quite a few young journalism...Continue reading
The financial information service Bloomberg hosted last Friday's London Search Meetup in their offices on Finsbury Square - the venue had to be seen to be believed, furnished as it is with neon, chrome, modern art and fishtanks. A slight step up from the usual room above a pub! The first presenter was Ramkumar Aiyengar of Bloomberg on their new search...Continue reading
Last Wednesday evening the Cambridge Search Meetup was held with too very different talks - we started with Zoë Rose, an information architect who has lent her expertise to Proquest, the BBC and now the UK Government. She ga...Continue reading
