ECIR 2017 Industry Day, our book & a demo of live TV factchecking

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Charlie Hull

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

Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Charlie Hull

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading

Elasticsearch Percolator & Luwak: a performance comparison of streamed search implementations

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Tom

Most search applications work by indexing a relatively stable collection of documents and then allowing users to perform ad-hoc searches to retrieve relevant documents. However, in some cases it is useful to turn this model on its head, and match individual documents against a collection of saved queries. I shall refer to this model as "streamed search". One example of streamed search is in media monitoring. The monitoring agency's ...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

Searching for opportunities in Real-Time Analytics

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Charlie Hull

I spent a day last week at a new event from UNICOM, a conference on Real-Time Analytics. Mike Ferguson chaired the event and was kind enough to spend time with me over lunch exploring how search software might fit into the mix, something that has been on my mind since hearing about the Unified Log<...Continue reading

Out and about in January and February

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Charlie Hull

We're speaking at a couple of events soon: if you're in London and interested in Apache Lucene/Solr we're also planning another London User Group Meetup soon. Firstly my colleague Alan Woodward is speaking with Martin Kleppman at FOSDEM in Brussels (31st January-1st February) on Continue reading

A new Meetup for Lucene & Solr

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Charlie Hull

Last Friday we held the first Meetup for a new Apache Lucene/Solr User Group we've recently created (there's a very popular one for Elasticsearch so it seemed only fair Solr had ...Continue reading

London Search Meetup – Serious Solr at Bloomberg & Elasticsearch 1.0

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Charlie Hull

The financial information service Bloomberg hosted last Friday's London Search Meetup in their offices on Finsbury Square - the venue had to be seen to be believed, furnished as it is with neon, chrome, modern art and fishtanks. A slight step up from the usual room above a pub! The first presenter was Ramkumar Aiyengar of Bloomberg on their new search...Continue reading

ElasticSearch London Meetup – a busy and interesting evening!

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Charlie Hull

I was lucky enough to attend the London ElasticSearch User Group's Meetup last night - around 130 people came to the Goldman Sachs offices in Fleet Street with many more on the waiting list. It signifies quite how much interest there is in ElasticSearch these days and the event didn't disappoint, with some fascinating talks. Hugo Pickford-Wardle from Continue reading

Introducing Luwak, a library for high-performance stored queries

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Charlie Hull

A few weeks ago we spoke in Dublin at Lucene Revolution 2013 on our work in the media monitoring sector for various clients including Gorkana and Australian Associated Press. These organisations handle a huge number (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of news articles every day ...Continue reading