Elastic acquires Swiftype and broadens its offering to include enterprise search

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Charlie Hull

The news today that Elastic (the company behind the open source Elasticsearch software) has acquired Swiftype will have surprised a few people, even though Elastic has already acquired a good number of other companies. Swiftype have a couple of products that deliver cloud-based site and enterprise search and under the hood, all of this is built on Elasticsearch. Swiftype are part of a new ...Continue reading

A lack of cognition and some fresh FUD from Forrester

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Charlie Hull

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

Time to replace your Google Search Appliance with open source search

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Charlie Hull

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

London Text Analytics Meetup – Making sense of text with Lumi, Signal & Bloomberg

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Charlie Hull

This month's London Text Analytics Meetup, hosted by Bloomberg in their spectacular Finsbury Square offices, was only the second such event this year, but crammed in three great talks and attracted a wide range of people from both academia and business. We started with Gabriella Kazai o...Continue reading

Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 2

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Charlie Hull

Not such an early start for me for Day 2 (I'd been up pretty late running the Meetup the night before) but I did manage to catch the very end of Findwise's presentation on their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. This is a unique and valuable benchmark of the state of enterprise search - I urge you to read it, if for no oth...Continue reading

Rebrands and changing times for Elasticsearch

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Charlie Hull

I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading

A review of Stephen Arnold’s CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Charlie Hull

Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading

Elasticsearch London user group – The Guardian & Orchestrate test the limits

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Charlie Hull

Last week I popped into the Elasticsearch London meetup, hosted this time by The Guardian newspaper. Interestingly, the overall theme of this event was not just what the (very capable and flexible) Elasticsearch software is capable of, but also how things can go wrong and what to do about it. Jenny Sivapalan and Continue reading

More than an API – the real third wave of search technology

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Charlie Hull

I recently read a blog post by Karl Hampson of Realise Okana (who offer HP Autonomy and SRCH2 as closed source search options) on his view of the 'third wave' of search. The second wave he identifies (correctly) as open source, admitting somewhat grudgingly that "We’d heard about Lucene for years but no customers seemed to take it seriously until all of a s...Continue reading

Analysts getting a bad press – how can they do better?

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Charlie Hull

It seems to be a bad summer for analyst companies in several sectors: here's Forrester getting a kicking from Digital Clarity Group about their Wave report on Digital Experience Delivery Platforms (my first challenge was understanding what on earth those are, but I think it's a new shiny name for web content management), Nuix Continue reading