I've already written about Day 1 of Lucidworks' Activate conference; the second day started with a keynote on 'moral code', ethics & AI which unfortunately I missed, but a colleague reported that it was very encouraging to see topics such as diversity and inclusion raised in a keynote talk. Note that videos of some of the talks is starting to appear on Continue reading
A few years ago much marketing noise was made about Big Data. Every software vendor suddenly had a Big Data suite; you could suddenly buy Big Data capable hardware; consultants and experts would release thought pieces, blogs and books all about Big Data and how it would change the world. The reality of course was slightly different: Big Data meant...well, it meant whatever you wanted it to mean for your commercial purpose. For some people, what didn't fit in an Excel spreadsheet was Big Data, fo...Continue reading
The second event I attended in Berlin last week was the Mix Camp on e-commerce search (MICES), a small and focused event now in its second year and kindly hosted by Mytoys at their offices. Slides for the talks are available here and I hope videos will appear soon. The first talk was given ...Continue reading
Last night the estimable Martin White, intranet and enterprise search expert and author of many books on the subject, flagged up two surprising articles from Forrester who have declared that Cognitive Search (we'll define this using their own terms in...Continue reading
Back to the very impressive Bloomberg lecture theatre for this month's Lucene/Solr Meetup, with an good turnout (I'm guessing 60-70 people). Our first talk came from Diego Ceccarelli of Bloomberg on how his team have created a Solr implementation of Continue reading
Core search features are increasingly a commodity - you can knock up some indexing scripts in whatever scripting language you like in a short time, build a searchable inverted index with freely available open source software, and hook up your search UI quickly via HTTP - this all used to be a lot harder than it is now (unfortunately some vendors would have you believe this is still the case, which is reflected in their hefty price tags). However we're increasingly asked to develop features ...Continue reading
