More needles, more Haystacks, more relevance!

Those of us who have been working in the search sector for a while know that search tuning isn't just a matter of installing the default configuration, pointing the engine at some content and starting it up - in fact, if you do just that you'll probably end up with a search user experience that's even worse then whatever you're replacing and certainly a lot worse than your competitors' solution. It's also no longer about just knowing how one engine behaves and the magic tweaks to improve it - yo...Continue reading

Haystack Europe 2018, a brief retrospective

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