This week's London Lucene/Solr Meetup was hosted by asset management company BlackRock who also provided our first speakers. BlackRock manages an astonishing $4.7 trillion in assets (that's more than the GDP of Germany) and operates 90 different websites with around 250,000 content items, so a good and accurate website search engine is essenti...Continue reading
Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading
This week we held another Lucene/Solr London User Group event, kindly hosted by Barclays at their funky Escalator space in Whitechapel. First to talk were two colleagues of mine, Matt Pearce and Tom Winch, on the Continue reading
After a long day at a Real Time Analytics event (of which more later) I dropped into the Elasticsearch London User Group, hosted by Red Badger and provided with a ridiculously huge amount of pizza (I have a theory that you'll be able to spot an Elasticsearch developer in a few years by the size of their pizza-filled belly). ...Continue reading
Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I'd been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I'll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about me...Continue reading
It's looking like a busy Autumn for search events - first, I'm presenting at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014 in Washington DC on November 5th, talking about 'Turning Search Upside Down with open source software'. I'll be describing how we've replaced various underperforming, big name closed source search engines with faster & more scalable open ...Continue reading
Last Friday we hosted a hackday featuring Elasticsearch in Cambridge, following a similar event last year focused on Apache Lucene/Solr. Around 20 people attended from organisations working in sectors including analytics, digital music, bioinformatics and e-commerce, and all the Flax team were there as well. We started wi...Continue reading
We were lucky enough to have two speakers from Cambridge text mining company Linguamatics at last night's Meetup. Robin Newton kicked us off with an amusing and idiosyncratic view of the uses and mis-uses of search - starting with the problem that when you have text search software, every problem can look like search might solve it. He gave an example of his recent search for a new job: although matching ...Continue reading
A sunny evening last night for the latest Cambridge Search Meetup, which featured a couple of talks from Datastax on the highly scalable NoSQL database Apache Cassandra and how it is integrated with Apache Lucene/Solr. Continue reading
This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading
