As many others have noted, Google have recently announced their Google Search Appliance (GSA) will not be available for sale from 2017. Search gurus Miles Kehoe and Martin White have written an insightful analysis of the move with some recommendations as to what to do - because your GSA will simply stop working once the 2-year license expires. I don't agree with Lauren...Continue reading
Last week I attended one of my favourite annual search events, Search Solutions, held at the British Computer Society's base in Covent Garden. As usual this is a great chance to see what's new in the linked worlds of web, intranet and enterprise search and this year there was a focus on semantic search by several of the presenters. Continue reading
Yesterday was the always interesting Search Solutions one day conference held by the BCS IRSG in London, a mix of talks on different aspects of search. The first presentation was by Behshad Behzadi of Google on Conversational Search, where he showed a speech-capable search in...Continue reading
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
There's no doubt that the search market has been in turmoil for many months now: traditional, closed source vendors are either frantically repositioning to avoid the 'juggernaut that is Apache's Solr/Lucene project' or attempting to bore customers to death with Powerpoint. Our sources tell us that in the UK at...Continue reading
Google have launched a new version of their search appliance this week - this is the GSA of course, not the Google Mini which was canned in summer 2012 (someone hasn't told Google UK it seems - try buying one though). Although t...Continue reading
I visited Enterprise Search Europe for the first day only last week, and caught a number of the presentations as well as giving one of my own (which I won't discuss here but you'll hear more about over the next few weeks). First up was Paul Doscher of Lucid Imagination with a lively presentation discussing whether search...Continue reading
Our customer Cambridge Intellectual Property announced yesterday their new API for a collection of 55 million patents - 48 million more than Google Patents. It's great to see a Cambridge company innovating in this space, especially as the service is powered by Apache Solr (we've given them some small assistance with Continue reading
Last night there was a small gathering in Cambridge of open source search engine developers and enthusiasts. Richard Boulton hosted the event and began with an introduction to elasticsearch, which is an "Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene". Richard told us about...Continue reading
As promised here's a writeup of the day itself. I've split this into two parts. The first presentation was from Martin Szummer of Microsoft Research on 'Learning to Rank'. I'd seen some of the content before, presented by Mike Taylor at our own Cambridge S...Continue reading
