Over the last year or so we’ve seen the emergence of a new profession dedicated to improving how search systems present information to users – Relevance Engineering. Importantly this covers not just the technical aspects of search, but the business aspects – understanding the why as much as the how. Relevance engineers understand that search tuning is a multifaceted problem and there are no magic bullets (or magic AI robots) that will do all the work for you. I’ve started to write about relevance engineering recently to try and define what it means.

One of my favourite events last year was the first Haystack conference run by our partners Open Source Connections, which brought together both experienced relevance engineers and those new to the profession. It was friendly, informal, focused and informative. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that by the second day I was already thinking about how to bring the event to Europe – which we did successfully in October.

I’m very happy to say that Haystack is back in April 2019 and the Call for Papers is open until January 9th. If you’ve got an exciting relevance project or idea to talk about please do submit it. See you there!

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My only regret was how little time I had personally to catch up with the attendees, many of whom were from Flax clients past and present – I must have had 20 or 30 very brief chats during the day! Luckily a few of us went on for a drink afterwards and eventually a curry nearby. It was a very long day but from the feedback we’ve recieved so far a very successful one. We hope to make this a regular event on the calendar.

Thanks to all who made the event possible, our speakers and everyone who came – the slides are now available on the event website.

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