Eleven years of open source search

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Charlie Hull

It's now eleven years since we started Flax (initially as Lemur Consulting Ltd) in late July 2001, deciding to specialise in search application development with a focus on open source software. At the time the fallout from the dotcom crash was still evident and like today the economic picture was far from rosy. Since few people even knew what a search engine was (Google was relatively new and had only started selling advertising a year...Continue reading

Big Data – It's not always big and it's not always clever

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Charlie Hull

There's been a recent flurry of activity from search vendors (and those larger companies that have been buying them) around the theme of Big Data, which has become the fashionable marketing term for a sheaf of technologies including search, machine learning, Map Reduce and for scalability in general. If anyone impertinently asks why co...Continue reading

Next-generation media monitoring with open source search

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Charlie Hull

Media monitoring is not a traditional search application: for a start, instead of searching a large number of documents with a single query, a media monitoring application must search every incoming news story with potentially thousands of queries, searching for words and terms relevant to client requirements. This can be difficult to scale, especially when accuracy must be maintained - a client won't be happy if their media monitors miss relevant stories or send them news that isn't relevant. ...Continue reading

Questions to ask your search vendor

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Charlie Hull

#1 - How does it work? You'll probably get as many different answers to this as there are vendors - but you may not get the whole truth. Bear in mind that a lot of search engines share what theoretical ideas they apply. An engine might use a vector-space or probabilistic models for ordering results, for example. Most will create an Continue reading