This time Pivotal were our kind hosts for the London Lucene/Solr Meetup, providing a range of goodies including some frankly enormous pizzas - thanks Costas and colleagues, we couldn't have done it without you! Our first talk was from Uwe Schindler, Lucene committer, who started with...Continue reading
We've been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as 'Big Data' solutions - here's a quick overview of them. The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by D...Continue reading
In this blog post I want to introduce you to a new Apache Solr plugin component called XJoin. I'll show how we can use this to solve a common problem in e-commerce - how to use price discount data, provided by an external web API, to either filter the results of a product search or boost scores. A further post will show another example, using click-through data to influence the score of subsequent searches.
A few weeks ago we spoke in Dublin at Lucene Revolution 2013 on our work in the media monitoring sector for various clients including Gorkana and Australian Associated Press. These organisations handle a huge number (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of news articles every day ...Continue reading
Last night our US partners Lucid Imagination announced that LucidWorks, their packaged and supported version of Apache Lucene/Solr, is available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. It seems like only a few weeks since Amazon announced their own CloudSearch system and no doubt other 'search as a service' providers are waiting in the wings (we're going to need a new acronym as Sa...Continue reading
A guest post from Alan Woodward who has joined the Flax team recently: I’ve been working on migrating a client from a legacy dtSearch platform to a new system based on Lucene, part of which involves writing a query parser to translate their existing dtSearch queries into Lucene Query objects. dtSearch allows you to perform proximity searches – find doc...Continue reading
Another excellent evening as part of the Enterprise Search London Meetup series; very busy as usual. Amir Dotan started us off with details of his work in designing user interfaces for the financial services sector, describing some of the challenges involved in designing for a high-pressure and highly regulated environment. Although he didn't talk about search specifically we hear...Continue reading
We're very happy to announce that we've been selected as an Authorized Partner by Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Lucene and Solr. You can read the press release as a PDF here. Apache Lucene and Solr, available as open source software from the Apache Software Foundation, are powerful, scalable, reliable and fully-fea...Continue reading
So you're writing a search-related application in your favourite language, and you've decided to choose an open source search engine to power it. So far, so good - but how are the two going to communicate? Let's look at two engines, Xapian and Lucene, and compare how this might be done. Lucene is written in Java, Xapian in C/C++ - so if you're using those languages respectively, everything should be relatively simple - j...Continue reading
