In this month's Flax Newsletter:
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
I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading
This year's Enterprise Search Europe started early for me - I had been invited to give the opening keynote, so I made sure I arrived early enough to make sure my laptop would play nicely with the projector, always a worry! The keynote was well recieved and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about Continue reading
A common complaint from our clients is how difficult it is to find staff with experience of search applications and in particular Apache Lucene/Solr or Elasticsearch. With the explosive growth of open source search over the last few years, there simply aren't enough people on the market with the right skills and...Continue reading
This week's London Lucene/Solr Meetup was hosted by asset management company BlackRock who also provided our first speakers. BlackRock manages an astonishing $4.7 trillion in assets (that's more than the GDP of Germany) and operates 90 different websites with around 250,000 content items, so a good and accurate website search engine is essenti...Continue reading
Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading
Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading
