Inspiring students to work in Open Source Search
I've recently been asked to join the Industrial Advisory Board for the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex and will be talking to students there on Monday 5th February, repeating a similar talk I did last year. The subject is 'Working in Open Source Search' and I'll describe how we founded Flax back in 2001, how we've built, tuned and implemented open source search engines and some of the client projects we've worked on. It's been a fascinating journe...Continue reading
London Lucene/Solr Meetup: Query Pre-processing & SQL with Solr
Bloomberg kindly hosted the London Lucene/Solr Meetup last night and we were lucky enough to have two excellent speakers for the thirty or so attendees. Kriegler kicked off with a talk about the
ECIR 2017 Industry Day, our book & a demo of live TV factchecking
I visited Aberdeen before Easter to speak at Industry Day, a part of the European Conference on Information Retrieval. Following a reception at Aberdeen's Town House (a wonderful building) hosted by the Lord Provost I spent an evening with various information retrieval luminaries including Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex. We had a chance to discuss the book we're co-authoring (draft title 'Searching the Enterprise', designed as a review of t...Continue reading
London Lucene/Solr Meetup – Introducing Marple & Solr Classification
A small crowd for this month's London Lucene/Solr Meetup, kindly hosted by Barclays in their sumptuous Canary Wharf offices. I introduced the Meetup and spoke briefly on how Flax is currently looking for team members (want to work on a variety of cutting-edge open source search projects in the UK and abroad? Get in touch!) before introducing Flax's Alan Woodwar...Continue reading
Release 1.0 of Marple, a Lucene index detective
Back in October at our London Lucene Hackday Flax's Alan Woodward started to write Marple, a new open source tool for inspecting Lucene indexes. Since then we have made nearly 240 commits to the Marple GitHub repository, and are now happy to announce its first release.Continue reading
A fabulous FactHack for Full Fact
Last week we ran a hackday for Full Fact, hosted by Facebook in their London office. We had planned to gather a room full of search experts from our London Lucene/Solr Meetup and around twenty people attended from a range of companies including Bloomberg, Alfresc...Continue reading
Just the facts with Solr & Luwak
It won't have escaped your notice that factchecking is very much in the news recently due to last year's political upheavals in both the US and UK and the suspected influence of fake news on voters. Both traditional and social media organisations are making efforts in this area; examples include Channel 4 and Faceboo...Continue reading
Search Solutions 2016 review
Last week I attended Search Solutions, one of my favourite annual events where all aspects of search are covered from web to intranet to enterprise. The first speaker Sebastian Blohm from Microsoft spoke about a new personalised Clutter folder for email and how his team had first devel...Continue reading
Lucene Revolution 2016, Boston
After our two successful hackdays, it was on to the main event of the week and the largest open source search event of the year. In between catching up with other Lucene/Solr folks on the first day I enjoyed Chris 'Hossman' Hostetter's talk on Hidden Gems of Apache Sol...Continue reading
