Recipe for a strategic search review

We're sometimes asked by clients to examine not just their technical implementation of search, but also the wider picture: how search functionality is exposed to users, how it compares to competitors' websites and best practice. This process usually takes us ten days to two weeks and results in a highly detailed report with clear recommendations for improvement. This process is slightly different each time, but usually includes the following steps, shown with some examples of questions we mig...Continue reading

Flax announces partnership with Apache Kafka creators Confluent

We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading

Out and about in search & monitoring – Autumn 2015

It's been a very busy few months for events - so busy that it's quite a relief to be back in the office! Back in late November I travelled to Vienna to speak at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress with our client Infomedia about how we've helped them to migrate their media monitoring platform from the elderly, unsupported and hard to scale Continue reading

Flax Newsletter November 2015

In this month's Flax Newsletter:

  • Building an open source search team is hard - let us help with training & mentoring on Solr and Elasticsearch
  • RS Components: Flax & Quepid help us to make "crucial" data driven decisions for tuning search
  • 40x faster indexing with Elasticsearch for Hadoop - over a gigabyte per second!
...Continue reading

Quepid & Flax – if you’re not testing your search, you’re doing it wrong!

Earlier this year an e-commerce company asked us to look into how they should improve how they tested their website search queries. A relatively simple task you might think - but the company concerned has a turnover of over a billion pounds with at least half of this via digital channels, so measuring how well search works is essential to preserve revenue. Like (I suspect) many others, they were recording the results of thousands of test searches, carried out manually by their s...Continue reading

BioSolr – building better search for bioinformatics

The entire Flax technical team spent the day at the European Bioinformatics Institute yesterday discussing an exciting new project we'll begin this coming September, BioSolr. Funded by the BBSRC this collaboration between Flax and the EBI aims “to significantly advance the state of the art with regard to indexing and querying biomedical data with freely available open source software”. Continue reading

Solr and the changing landscape of search

This morning I was told about the launch of a new US-based search company, Heliosearch, founded by the creator of Apache Solr, Yonik Seeley. It seems the landscape of open source search and in particular Solr is changing again - Heliosearch are planning their own 'certified' distribution of Solr plus a raft of support, consulting and services. In the meantime, the comp...Continue reading

Finding the elephant in the room: open source search & Hadoop grow closer together

I've been lucky enough to attend two talks on Hadoop in the last few weeks which has made me take a closer look at this technology. In case you didn't know, Hadoop is an Apache top level open source project comprising a framework for distributed computing and storage, originally created by Doug Cutting (also the creator of Apache Lucene) while at Yahoo! in 2005. Distributed computing is carried out using Continue reading

New Year predictions: further search storms ahead!

2012 has been a fascinating and stormy year for those of us in the search business. We've seen a raft of further acquisitions of commercial closed source search companies by bigger players, some convinced that what used to be called Enterprise Search is now a solution to Big Data (like Stephen Arnold we wonder what will succeed Big Data as the next marketing term - I love his phrase "In a quest for revenue, the vendo...Continue reading