Haystack Europe 2018, a brief retrospective

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Charlie Hull

It's been a couple of weeks now since the first Haystack search relevance conference in Europe, which we ran with our partners Open Source Connections (OSC). Just under a hundred people came to the Friends' House in Euston for a day of talks covering both the business and technical aspects of relevance engineering. Doug Turnbull of OSC started the day by introducing what would be a major theme of the conference, Learning to Rank, and how Bloomberg had used and benefited from open sourcing their ...Continue reading

Defining relevance engineering part 3: technical assessment

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Charlie Hull

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

Lucene Solr London: Search Quality Testing and Search Procurement

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Charlie Hull

Mimecast were our kind hosts for the latest London Lucene/Solr Meetup (and even provided goodie bags). It's worth repeating that we couldn't run these events without the help of sponsors and hosts and we're always very grateful (and keep those offers coming!). First up was Andrea Gazzarini presenting a brand new framework for search quality testing. Designed for offline m...Continue reading

London Lucene/Solr Meetup – Relevance tuning for Elsevier’s Datasearch & harvesting data from PDFs

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Charlie Hull

Elsevier were our kind hosts for the latest London Lucene/Solr Meetup and also provided the first speaker, Peter Cotroneo. Peter spoke about their DataSearch project, a search engine for scientific data. After describing how most other data search engines only index and rank results using metadata,...Continue reading

Haystack, the search relevance conference – day 2

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Charlie Hull

Two weeks ago I attended the Haystack relevance conference – I’ve already written about my overall impressions and on the first day's talks but the following are some more notes on the conference sessions. Note that some of the presentations I attended have already been covered in detail...Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Business, Events | Tagged closed source, conference, event, open source, relevance, search relevance tuning, test driven relevance, tika, vespa | Leave a reply

Haystack, the search relevance conference – day 1

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Charlie Hull

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Last week I attended the Haystack relevance conference - I've already written about my overall impressions but the following are some more notes on the conference sessions. Note that some of the presentations I attended have already been covered in detail by Sujit Pal's excellent ...Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Events | Tagged click tracking, conference, haystack, lucidworks, relevance, search relevance tuning, SOLR | Leave a reply

How to build a search relevance team

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Charlie Hull

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We've spent a lot of time working with clients who recognise that their search engine isn't delivering relevant results to users. Often this is seen as solely a technical problem, which can be resolved simply by changing query parameters or the search engine configuration - but technical teams need clear direction on why a result should or should not appear at a certain position, not just request for general relevance improvements. It's thus important to consider relevance as...Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Business | Tagged open source, quepid, relevance, search relevance team, search relevance tuning, tuning | Leave a reply