Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? Continue reading
To mark Flax's 15th anniversary we ran two Lucene Hackdays recently, in London and Continue reading
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
Last week Doug Turnbull of US-based Open Source Connections visited the UK and spoke at our Meetup. His first talk was on Search Relevancy, an area that we often deal with at Flax: how to tune a search engine to give results that our clients deem relevant, without affecting the results for other queries. Using a ...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
I'm not going to comment on the various financial aspects of the recent news about HP's write-down of the value of its Autonomy acquisition - others are able to do this far better than me - but I would urge anyone interested to re-read the documents Oracle released earlier this year. However, I am going to write about the IDOL technology itself (I'd ...Continue reading
Last night there was a small gathering in Cambridge of open source search engine developers and enthusiasts. Richard Boulton hosted the event and began with an introduction to elasticsearch, which is an "Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene". Richard told us about...Continue reading
As promised here's a writeup of the day itself. I've split this into two parts. The first presentation was from Martin Szummer of Microsoft Research on 'Learning to Rank'. I'd seen some of the content before, presented by Mike Taylor at our own Cambridge S...Continue reading
Last night was the second Cambridge search meetup, held in a (rather noisy as it turned out) pub close to the river. It was great to see so many new faces from a wide range of backgrounds including bioinformatics, rare books and academic publishing. First of the talks was from Tyler Tate of TwigKit, who described the typical se...Continue reading
