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!

The post Search Solutions 2015 – Is semantic search finally here? appeared first on Flax.

Firstly, if you’re going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don’t choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn’t anything at all (except snake oil) – it’s a way of attempting to game the algorithms of web search engines. Secondly, at least make some attempt to prevent your experts from just listing the capabilities of their own companies in their answers: in fact one ‘expert’ was actually a set of PR-friendly answers from a company rather than a person, including listing articles about their own software. The expert from Microsoft rather predictably failed to notice the impact of open source on the search market, before going on to put a positive spin on the raft of acquisitions of search companies over the last few years (and it’s certainly not all good, as a recent writedown has proved). Apparently the acquisition of specialist search companies by corporate behemoths will drive innovation – that is, unless that specialist knowledge vanishes into the behemoth’s Big Data strategy, never to be seen again. Woe betide the past customers that have to get used to a brand new pricing, availability and support plan as well.

Luckily it wasn’t all bad – there were some sensible viewpoints on the need for better interaction with the user, the rise of semantic analysis and how the rise of open source is driving out inefficiency in the market – but the article is absolutely peppered with buzzwords (Big Data being the most prevalent, of course) and contains some odd cliches: “I think a generation of people believes the computer should respond like HAL 9000″…didn’t HAL 9000 kill most of the crew and attempt to lock the survivor outside the airlock?

I’m pretty sure this isn’t a feature we want to replicate in an Enterprise Search system.

The post How not to predict the future of search appeared first on Flax.

After a short break we continued with a talk by Henning Rode on CV Search at TextKernel. He described a simple yet powerful UI for searching CVs (resumes) with autosuggest and automatic field recognition (type in “Jav” and the system suggests “Java” and knows this is a programming language or skill). He is also working on systems to autogenerate queries from job vacancies using heuristics. We’ve worked in the recruitment space ourselves so it was interesting to hear about their approach, although the technical detail was light. Following Henning was Dermot Frost talking about Information Preservation and Access at the Digital Repository of Ireland and their use of open source technology including Solr and Blacklight to build a search engine with a huge variety of content types, file formats and metadata standards across the items they are trying to digitally preserve. Currently this is a relatively small collection of data but they are planning to scale up over the next few years: this talk reminded me a little of last year‘s by Emma Bayne of the UK’s National Archive.

After lunch we began a session named Understanding the User, beginning with Filip Radlinski of Microsoft Research. He discussed Sensitive Online Search Evaluation (with arXiv.org as a test collection) and how interleaved results is a powerful technique for avoiding bias. Next was Mounia Lalmas of Yahoo! Labs on what makes An Engaging Click (although unfortunately I had to pop out for a short while so I missed most of what I am sure was a fascinating talk!). Mags Hanley was next on Understanding users search intent with examples drawn from her work at TimeOut – the three main lessons being to know the content in context, the time of year and the users’ mental model in context. Interestingly she showed how the most popular facets used differed across TimeOut’s various international sites – in Paris the top facet was perhaps unsurprisingly ‘cuisine’, in London it was ‘date’.

After another short break we continued with Helen Lippell‘s talk on Enterprise Search – how to triage problems quickly and prescribe the right medicine – her five main points being analyze user needs, fix broken content, focus on quick wins in the search UI, make sure you are able to tweak the search engine itself in a documentable fashion and remember the importance of people and process. Her last point ‘if search is a political football, get an outsider perspective’ is of course something we would agree with! Next was Peter Wallqvist of Ravn Systems on Universal Search and Social Networking where he focussed on how to allow users to interact directly with enterprise content items by tagging, sharing and commenting – so as to derive a ‘knowledge graph’ showing how people are connected by their relationships to content. We’ve built systems in the past that have allowed users to tag items in the search result screen itself so we can agree on the value of this approach. Our last presenter with Kristian Norling of Findwise on Reflections on the 2013 Enterprise Search Survey – some more positive news this year, with budgets for search increasing and 79% of respondents indicating that finding information is of high importance for their organisation. Although most respondents still have less than one full time staff member working on search, Kristian made the very good point that recruiting just one extra person would thus give them a competitive advantage. Perhaps as he says we’ve now reached a tipping point for the adoption of properly funded enterprise search regarded as an ongoing journey rather than a ‘fire and forget’ project.

The day finished with a ‘fishbowl’ session, during which there was a lot of discussion of how to foster links between the academic IR community and industry, then the BCS IRSG AGM and finally a drinks reception – thanks to all the organisers for a very interesting and enlightening day and we look forward to next year!

The post Search Solutions 2013, a review appeared first on Flax.

A recent client wished to convert documents to and from Microsoft Office formats, using a web form as an intermediate step for editing the content. The documents were read in, imported to a Solr search engine, and could then be searched over, cloned, edited and transformed in batches, before being exported to Office once more.

The content itself was broken down into fields, some of which were simple text or date entry boxes, while others were more complex rich text fields. We opted to use TinyMCE as our rich text editor of choice – it’s small, open source, and easy to extend (we already knew we wanted to write at least one plugin).

The problem arose when the client explained to us that they wanted to use the tab key in rich text fields to create consistent spacing in the text. These needed to display as closely as possible to the original document format, and convert to actual tabs in the Office documents. This presented a number of problems:
By default, the tab key moves the user to the next field on a web page, and needs special handling to prevent this behaviour, especially when it only needs to be applied to certain fields on the page. The spacing had to be consistent, like a word processor’s tab stop. This is tricky when working with proportional fonts, especially in a web form.

The client didn’t want to use an indent feature. The tab only came at the start of the paragraph – beyond that point the text could wrap around to the start of the line. The tab needed to be recognisable in our processing code, so it could be converted to a real tab when it was exported to MS Office.

The preferred solution would have been a document editor like that used for Google Docs. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to write the whole input and presentation layer in Javascript as Google have! We also wanted to keep the editing function inside the web application if possible, rather than forcing the user to edit the documents in Microsoft Office and then re-import them every time they needed to make changes.

I started with TinyMCE’s “nonbreaking” plugin, which captures the tab key and converts it to a number of non-breaking spaces. This wasn’t directly suitable for our needs – I discovered that the number of spaces is not always consistent, and they are sometimes converted to regular (rather than non-breaking) spaces. In addition, it doesn’t act like a tab stop – it inserts four spaces wherever you are on the line, which didn’t match the client’s requirement.

I adapted the plugin to insert a <span> into the text, using variable padding to ensure it was the right width. This worked reasonably well, after a not insignificant amount of head scratching trying to work around issues with spacing and space handling. Unfortunately, we struck usability problems when trying to backspace over the tab. The ideal situation would be that a single backspace would remove the entire tab, leaving the user at the start of the line (or the point before they hit the tab key). In fact, a single backspace would leave the user inside the span – two backspaces were required to visibly remove the tab from the editor, and the user could not tell that they were inside the span either. You couldn’t reliably select the “tab” with the mouse either. In addition, Firefox started to behave oddly at this point, putting the cursor in unexpected positions.

My final solution was ugly but workable. We switched to using a monospace font in the rich text editor and, after discussion with the client, started using a variable number of arrow characters to represent the tabs (we actually used ›, or a closing single quote, if you are reading and writing in German). This made life immediately simpler – dropping the proportional font meant that we didn’t have to worry about getting the width right, just the number of characters to insert. It does mean that in order to remove the tab, the user has to backspace over up to four characters, but the characters are clearly visible: you don’t find yourself inside a span that can’t be seen without viewing the underlying HTML.

While I’m sure this isn’t a unique problem, I couldn’t find anyone else that had been trying to do something similar. I am also not sure whether our choice of rich text editor affected how tricky this problem turned out to be. If anybody reading has suggestions of better approaches to this, we’d be interested to hear from them.

The post The trouble with tabbing: editing rich text on the Web appeared first on Flax.

We’ve talked to a number of clients over the last month or so who are determined to move away from Autonomy IDOL itself, citing reasons such as a lack of ownership of code (so even tiny changes to a user interface need to be carried out by expensive consultants), scaling being difficult and expensive, and indifferent support even after the HP acquisition. As I wrote at the time moving from one closed-source technology to another doesn’t really reduce any risk that your supplier will change their roadmap, prices or corporate strategy to your disadvantage.

Perhaps it’s time to cut the strings and take control of your search.

The post Rescue attempts continue for those abandoned by closed source search appeared first on Flax.

Milad Shokouhi of Microsoft Research started us off showing us how he’s worked on query trend analysis for Bing: he showed us how some queries are regular, some spike and go and some spike and remain – and how these trends can be modelled in various ways. Alex Jaimes of Yahoo! Barcelona talked about a human centred approach to search – I agree with his assertion that “we’re great at adapting to bad technology” – still sadly true for many search interfaces! Some of the demographic approaches have led to projects such as Yahoo! Clues which is worth a look.

Martin White of Intranet Focus was up next with some analysis of recent surveys and research, leading to some rather doom-laden conclusions about just how few companies are investing sufficiently in search. Again some great quotes: “Information Architects think they’ve failed if users still need a search engine” and a plea for search vendors (and open source exponents) to come clean about what search can and can’t do. Emma Bayne of the National Archives was next with a description of their new Discovery catalogue, a similar presentation to the one she gave earlier in the year at Enterprise Search Europe. Kristian Norling of Findwise finished with a laconic and amusing treatment of the results from Findwise’s survey on enterprise search – indicating that those who produce systems that users are “very satisfied” usually do the same things, such as regular user testing and employing a specialist internal search team.

Stella Dextre Clark talked next about a new ISO standard for thesauri, taxonomies and their interopability with other vocabularies – some great points on the need for thesauri to break down language barriers, help retrieval in enterprise situations where techniques such as PageRank aren’t so useful and to access data from decades past. Leo Sauermann was next with what was my personal favourite presentation of the day, about a project to develop a truly semantic search engine both for KDE Linux and currently the Cloud. This system, if more widely adopted, promises a true revolution in search, as relationships between data objects are stored directly by the underlying operating system. I spoke next about our Clade taxonomy/classification system and our Flax Media Monitor, which I hope was interesting.

Nicholas Kemp of DSTL was up next exploring how they research new technologies and approaches which might be of interest to the defence sector, followed by Richard Morgan of Funnelback on how to empower intranet searchers with ways to improve relevance. He showed how Funnelback’s own intranet allows users to adjust multiple factors that affect relevance – of course it’s debatable how these may be best applied to customer situations.

The day ended with a ‘fishbowl’ discussion during which a major topic was of course the Autonomy/HP debacle – there seemed to be a collective sense of relief that perhaps now marketing and hype wouldn’t dominate the search market as much as it had previously…but perhaps also that’s just my wishful thinking! All in all this was as ever an interesting and fun day and my thanks to the IRSG organisers for inviting me to speak. Most of the presentations should be available online soon.

The post Search Solutions 2012 – a review appeared first on Flax.

Lucid’s offering is considerably more flexible and full-featured than Amazon’s, which we hear is pretty basic with a lack of standard search features like contextual snippets and a number of bugs in the client software. You can see the latter in action at Runar Buvik’s excellent OpenTestSearch website. With prices for the Lucid service ranging from free for small indexes, this is certainly an option worth considering.

The post Strange bedfellows? The rise of cloud based search appeared first on Flax.

Jordan Hrycaj of 7Safe, recently acquired by PA Consulting, was up next to talk about what he described as ‘ad-hoc’ search – for use in digital forensics or digital discovery applications. The application he described can be used to search the hard disks of suspect PCs or servers for information such as credit card numbers extremely quickly, working at a low level to avoid leaving any impression on the data (i.e., no file timestamps are altered) and usually working on live systems. This system is command line based, tiny in size and portable across operating systems and is an impressive way to cut down the likely candidates for a data security breach. It was fascinating to hear about a way to search that doesn’t depend on indexing, and the compromises made for performance reasons (i.e., regular expressions can be used but without wildcards).

Thanks to both speakers and to all who came to hear them. We already have some more talks lined up so we expect the next Meetup to be sooner rather than later!

The post Search Meetup Cambridge – Challenges of Unstructured Data appeared first on Flax.

The day started with a talk by John Tait on the challenges of patent search where different units are concerned – where for example a search for a plastic with a melting point of 200°C wouldn’t find a patent that uses °F or Kelvin. John presented a solution from max.recall, a plugin for Apache Solr that promises to solve this issue. We then heard from Lewis Crawford of the UK Web Archive on their very large index of 240m archived webpages – some great features were shown including a postcode-based browser. The system is based on Apache Solr and they are also using ‘big data’ projects such as Apache Hadoop – which by the sound of it they’re going to need as they’re expecting to be indexing a lot more websites in the future, up to 4 or 5 million. The third talk in this segment came from Toby Mostyn of Polecat on their MeaningMine social media monitoring system, again built on Solr (a theme was beginning to emerge!). MeaningMine implements an iterative query method, using a form of relevance feedback to help users contribute more useful query information.

Before lunch we heard from Ricardo Baeza-Yates of Yahoo! on moving beyond the ‘ten blue links’ model of web search, with some fascinating ideas around how we should consider a Web of objects rather than web pages. Gabriella Kazai of Microsoft Research followed, talking about how best to gather high-quality relevance judgements for testing search algorithms, using crowdsourcing systems such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Some good insights here as to how a high-quality task description can attract high-quality workers.

After lunch we heard from Marianne Sweeney with a refreshingly candid treatment of how best to tune enterprise search products that very rarely live up to expectations – I liked one of her main points that “the product is never what was used in the demo”. Matt Taylor from Funnelback followed with a brief overview of his company’s technology and some case studies.

The last section of the day featured Iain Fletcher of Search Technologies on the value of metadata and on their interesting new pipeline framework, Aspire. (As an aside, Iain has also joined the Pipelines meetup group I set up recently). Next up was Jared McGinnis of the Press Association on their work on Semantic News – it was good to see an openly available news ontology as a result. Ian Kegel of British Telecom came next with a talk about TV program recommendation systems, and we finished with Kristian Norling‘s talk on a healthcare information system that he worked on before joining Findwise. We ended with a brief Fishbowl discussion which asked amongst other things what the main themes of the day had been – my own contribution being “everyone’s using Solr!”.

It’s rare to find quite so many search experts in one room, and the quality of discussions outside the talks was as high as the quality of the talks themselves – congratulations are due to the organisers for putting together such an interesting programme.

The post Search Solutions 2011 review appeared first on Flax.

One can’t deny that the search market is going through some huge changes at the moment. Larger vendors are being acquired which can lead to some major (and not always welcome) changes in the product, pricing and service. Smaller vendors are finding it increasingly hard to compete with the plethora of powerful open source solutions (we’ve heard rumours of prices of closed source solutions being dropped radically to attempt to secure new business). There are also some interesting moves towards more comprehensive Business Intelligence and Unified Access solutions, such as Attivio.

I don’t think enterprise search is dying as a market or an offering, simply changing – and hopefully for the better, into an era of more realistic pricing, solutions that actually work (rather than promising ‘magic’) and more openness in terms of the technology and capability.

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