The Welsh Clinical Portal is a classic example of how a search engine can be used to bring together huge amounts of data. Many records are still paper based and electronic records are created across different applications, hospitals and GP practices. The Welsh Clinical Portal allows hospital clinicians to easily find and view essential healthcare information such as medication details and referral notes.

The system itself has been designed to handle up to 300 million documents and will be constantly updated with the thousands of new items added every day. Solr provides powerful and accurate search and fast response times.

As their recent newsletter notes, “this is considered to be the first time Solr has been applied to a health enterprise architecture on a national scale”. We’re seeing increasing adoption of open source software in the healthcare domain, with a recent development being NHS England’s creation of the Apperta Foundation to help manage the adoption of new open source applications that can easily be extended and re-used with no license fees payable. The Welsh Clinical Portal is a great example of what can be achieved with open source software while reducing costs – an essential consideration for a publicly-funded healthcare organisation.

If you need help designing, building or supporting applications based on Solr, for healthcare or any other application, do get in touch.

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Solr, being the older and more mature project, is often chosen by organisations who are comfortable with building and managing enterprise Java applications, already using other Apache open source projects and whose data is generally complex and of many different sizes and types. The queries used may also be quite complex. They like the fact that there are many places to obtain support and development services from and the wide range of documentation, books and articles on Solr. They also like its proven stability at large scale. Some examples from our own client list are Bloomberg, News UK, Reed Specialist Recruitment and Infomedia.

Elasticsearch is often chosen by organisations who are following the latest trends in terms of programming languages and frameworks, aren’t necessarily thinking they need a ‘search engine’ (they may for example be building analytics tools) and are likely to be ingesting a large number of reasonably small items of data. They want a tool that will scale easily and automatically without them having to think about how to do it. Although there isn’t so much documentation on Elasticsearch, and the support and training options are pretty much centred around one company (who also control the development roadmap), they like the fact that it’s quick to get started with. Some examples from our own client list are Arachnys, the Office for National Statistics, Westcoast and Eagle Genomics.

There’s exceptions of course and several of our clients use both Solr and Elasticsearch in different situations and for different purposes. You can build site search, enterprise search, Big Data and analytics systems with either – and we’re happy to offer consulting, training and support for both. If you need advice or help with your choice do get in touch or come along to a Meetup and chat to us in person.

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The search idea

So you’ve got this idea and you’re convinced that you need search as part of the puzzle, but you’re not sure where it fits, whether it will be performant or how to gather and transform your data so it’s ready for searching. Perhaps you’re from a startup, or maybe part of a skunkworks projects in a larger organisation. What you need is someone who really understands search software and what can be done with it to sit with you for a day or two, validate your technical choices, help you understand how to shape your data, even play with some basic indexing.

The proof of concept

You’re a little further along – you know what technology you’ll be using and you have some data all ready for indexing. However, before your funders or boss will release more budget you need to build something they can see (and search) – you’ll need an indexer and a basic search application. You could do it yourself but time is limited and you’ve not built a search application before. You’re expecting to spend a week or two developing something to show others, that lets them search real data and see real results. You might also want to experiment with scale – see what happens to performance when you add a few million items to the index, even if the schema isn’t quite right yet.

The big one

You’re building the big one – indexing complex data or many millions of items, and/or for a huge user base. You need to be very sure your indexing pipeline is fast, scales well, copes with updates and can transform data from many sources. You need to develop the very best search schema. Your search architecture must be resilient, cope with heavy load, failover cleanly and give the correct results. You’re assembling a team to build it but you need specialist help from people who have built this kind of system at scale before.

The migration

Finally you’ve secured budget to move away from the slow and innacurate search engine that everyone hates! Search really does suck, but you now have a chance to make it better. However, although you know how to keep the old engine running you don’t have much experience of open source search. Even though the old engine isn’t great, you’re doing a lot of business with it and you want to be confident that relevance is as good (and hopefully better) with the new engine – maybe you want to develop a testing framework?

We’re also increasingly delivering training (both for business users who want to know the capabilities of open source search and for technical users who want to improve their knowledge – we can tailor this to your requirements) and ongoing support – but everything starts with a search project of some kind!

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Migrating a search engine from one technology to another is rarely trouble-free: data must be re-indexed, query architectures rewritten, integration with external systems re-done, relevancy checked…however with sufficient forethought it can be done successfully. We’ve just helped one client migrate from a commercial engine to Apache Solr in a matter of weeks: although at first glance Solr didn’t seem to support all of the features the commercial engine provided, it proved possible to simulate them using multiple queries and with careful design for scalability, query performance is comparable.

Choosing one closed source engine to replace another doesn’t remove the risk that future corporate mergers & acquisitions will cause exactly the same lack of confidence that is no doubt affecting Autonomy customers – or huge increases in license fees, a drop in the quality of available support or the end of the product line altogether – and we’ve heard of all of these effects over the last few years. Moving to an open source search engine gives you freedom and control of the future of the technology your business is reliant upon, with a wealth of options for migration assistance, development and support.

So here’s our offer – we’d be happy to talk, for free (by phone or face-to-face for customers within reach of our Cambridge offices), to any Autonomy customers considering migration and to help them consider the open source options (some of these even have the Bayesian, probabilistic search features Autonomy IDOL provides) – and together with our partners we can also provide a level of ongoing support comparable to any closed source vendor. We don’t have salespeople, we don’t have a product to sell you and you’ll be talking directly to experts with decades of experience implementing search – and there’s no obligation to take things any further. We’d simply like to offer an alternative (and we believe, safer) route to effective search.

The post Trading-up to open source – a safer route to effective search appeared first on Flax.

We’re also happy to announce that Flax and Sirius will be co-hosting a free, half day event on Open Source Enterprise Search on Friday 20th July from 9.30 a.m. Held at the Sirius Corporation offices in Weybridge, Surrey, this will be an opportunity to find out how open source search can directly benefit your business. Whether you need search over documents on an intranet or database, pages on a website or more specialised applications such as media monitoring, taxonomy and classification, open source technologies can offer an economical and highly scalable route to success. The event will feature focussed briefings, networking and discussion with leading experts in the field. It’s completely free to attend and breakfast, refreshments and a riverside barbeque lunch will be provided.

You can register and find out more online.

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