Sadly I missed COWI‘s talk on migrating from Autonomy to Sharepoint 2013 (as you might expect I would have asked why move from one closed source solution to another when open source options exist). I did however catch Kurt Kragh Sørenson of Intrateam talking about lessons learned from their Enterprise Search Community of Practice in Denmark and Sweden – one particular phrase that stood out for me was “If your colleagues have given up on your search function it will take a long time to re-establish trust in your search function again”. Next was Anita Wilcox of University College Cork with a talk on their implementation of an open source system, reSearcher, which I hadn’t heard of before. She also talked about a federated search built using exploreIT from Deep Web Technologies and added that one should focus on developing a minimal viable product rather than lots of ‘nice to have’ features. Note that the library is named after George Boole, father of the Boolean logic used in most search engines to construct complex queries!

Next was the presentation of the Tony Kent Strix Award to Professor Peter Ingwersen, which started with an amusing tale of how it may be difficult to take a statue of an owl through airport security. After lunch, I had to step out for a meeting so missed a talk about the Port of Antwerp, but was glad to return to hear from Paul Cleverley of Robert Gordon University who has done some fascinating work on the ‘why’ of enterprise search and how to measure the impact of search. I’ll be using his research to inform my forthcoming presentation at Search Solutions next month.

The day finished with a ‘search clinic’ panel chaired by Valentin Richter of Raytion. I was very glad to hear Steve Woodward of AstraZeneca confirm that he can see a role for real-time analytics driven by search – confirming what I had said in my keynote the day before.

This year’s event was in my mind the best in terms of the content of the presentations – including some inspirational case studies from very large companies on how enterprise search can deliver better ways of working. I was also particularly pleased to see so many mentions of open source search software – back in 2011, at the first Enterprise Search Europe conference, this was still a relatively unknown option. Thanks as ever to the conference chair, Martin White, and Information Today for running the event.

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Peter Mika of Yahoo! started us off with a brief history of semantic search including how misplaced expectations have led to a general lack of adoption. However, the large web search companies have made significant progress over the years leading to shared standards for semantically marking of web content and some large collections of knowledge, which allows them to display content for certain queries, e.g. actor’s biographies shown on the right of the usual search results. He suggested the next step is to better understand queries as most of the work to date has been on understanding documents. Christopher Semturs of Google followed with a description of their efforts in this space, Google’s Knowledge Graph containing 40 billion facts about 530 million entities, built in part by converting web pages directly (including how some badly structured websites can contain the most interesting and rare knowledge). He reminded us of the importance of context and showed some great examples of queries that are still hard to answer correctly. Katja Hofmann of Microsoft then described some ways in which search engines might learn directly from user interactions, including some wonderfully named methodologies such as Counterfactual Reasoning and the Contextual Bandit. She also mentioned their continuing work on Learning to Rank with the open source Lerot software.

Next up was our own Tom Mortimer presenting our study comparing the performance of Apache Solr and Elasticsearch – you can see his slides here. While there are few differences Tom has found that Solr can support three times the query rate. Iadh Ounis of the University of Glasgow followed, describing another open source engine, Terrier, which although mainly focused on academic research does now contain some cutting edge features including the aforementioned Learning to Rank and near real-time search.

The next session featured Dan Jackson of UCL describing the challenges of building website search across a complex set of websites and data, a similar talk to one he gave at an earlier event this year. Next was our ex-colleague Richard Boulton describing how the Gov.uk team use metrics to tune their search capability (based on Elasticsearch). Interestingly most of their metric data is drawn from Google Analytics, as a heavy use of caching means they have few useful query logs.

Jussi Karlgren of Gavagai then described how they have built a ‘living lexicon’ of text in several languages, allowing for the representation of the huge volume of new terms that appear on social media every week. They have also worked on multi-dimensional sentiment analysis and visualisations: I’ll be following these developments with interest as they echo some of the work we have done in media monitoring. Richard Ranft of the British Library then showed us some of the ways search is used to access the BL’s collection of 6 million audio tracks including very early wax cylinder recordings – they have so much content it would take you 115 years to listen to it all! The last presentation of the day was by Jochen Leidner of Thomson Reuters who showed some of the R&D projects he has worked on for data including legal content and mining Twitter for trading signals.

After a quick fishbowl discussion and a glass of wine the event ended for me, but I’d like to thank the BCS IRSG for a fascinating day and for inviting us to speak – see you next year!

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