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
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
We’ve been working internally on a document encapsulating how we build (and recommend others should build) search applications based on Apache Solr, probably the most popular open source search engine library. As an early Christmas present we’re releasing these as a two part series – if you have any feedback we’d welcome comments! Here's the second part, you can also read the Continue reading
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
This morning the largest open source search project, Apache Lucene/Solr, released a new version with a raft of new features. We've been advising clients to consider version 4.0 for several months now, as the alpha and beta versions have become available, and we know of several already running this version on live sites. Here's a few highlights:
We're happy to announce we've just finished a successful project for a division of the Australian Associated Press to replace a closed source search engine with a considerably more powerful open source solution. You can read the press release here. As our client had a large investment in stored searches (which repr...Continue reading
A customer of ours has a potential search application which requires (largely for reasons of performance) the ability to update specific individual fields of Apache Lucene documents. This is not the first time that someone has asked for this functionality. However, until now, it has been impossible to change field values in a Lucene document without re-indexing the...Continue reading
We recently overhauled the search functionality for the UK government's e-petitions site, run by the Government Digital Service, a new team within the Cabinet Office. Search has an important function on the site; users are forced to search for existing petitions which cover their area of concern before creating a new one. This cuts down on the number of near-duplicate petitions, and makes petitions ...Continue reading
We've been working on a client project where we needed to replace the dtSearch closed source search engine, which doesn't perform that well at scale in this case. As the client has significant investment in stored queries (it's for a monitoring application) they were keen that the new engine spoke exactly the same query language as the old - so we've built a version of Apache Lucene to replace dtSearch. There are a ...Continue reading
We're working with a number of clients on media monitoring solutions, which are a special case of search application (we've worked on this previously for Durrants). In standard search, you apply a single query to a large amount of documents, expecting to get a ranked list of documents that match your query as a result. However in media monitoring you need to ...Continue reading
