Last week I attended one of my favourite annual search events, Search Solutions, held at the British Computer Society's base in Covent Garden. As usual this is a great chance to see what's new in the linked worlds of web, intranet and enterprise search and this year there was a focus on semantic search by several of the presenters. Continue reading
I've just seen an article titled Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search which presents a list of somewhat contradictory opinions. I'm afraid I have some serious issues with the experts chosen and the undeniably blinkered views some of them have presented. 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 ...Continue reading
Yesterday was the always interesting Search Solutions one day conference held by the BCS IRSG in London, a mix of talks on different aspects of search. The first presentation was by Behshad Behzadi of Google on Conversational Search, where he showed a speech-capable search in...Continue reading
Matt Pearce, who joined the Flax team earlier this year, writes: 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 cont...Continue reading
I notice this morning that Autonomy have created a rescue program for those unhappy with Microsoft's decision to offer FAST search only as part of Sharepoint - slightly late to the party, considering this had been long predicted. Last year it was Autonomy...Continue reading
Last Thursday I spent the day at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event, run by their Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Unlike some events I could mention, this isn't a forum for sales pitches, over-inflated claims or business speak - just some great presentations on all aspects of search and some lively networking or discussion. It's one of my favourite events of t...Continue reading
Last night our US partners Lucid Imagination announced that LucidWorks, their packaged and supported version of Apache Lucene/Solr, is available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. It seems like only a few weeks since Amazon announced their own CloudSearch system and no doubt other 'search as a service' providers are waiting in the wings (we're going to need a new acronym as Sa...Continue reading
Another Cambridge Search Meetup this week, with two speakers on unstructured data, plus the usual networking, beer and snacks. We started with Dean Yearsley of Pingar talking and bravely attempting a live demo of their API, which amongst other things has facilities for entity extraction i...Continue reading
I spent yesterday at the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group's annual Search Solutions conference, which brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in search. 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 poin...Continue reading
I spent yesterday morning at Ovum's briefing on Enterprise Search, and they kindly invited me to sit on a discussion panel. One of the more controversial topics raised by analyst Mike Davis was 'Is Enterprise Search dead?' which provoked some lively discussion. We also heard from Tyler Tate of Twigkit on Search UX, Exalead on Search Based Applications and Continue reading
