It’s not just about technology – training for search managers is vital

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Charlie Hull

A few weeks ago I sat in on a workshop in London at the Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, run by Jeff Fried of BA Insight. I've known Jeff for many years from various events and we share some views on how search systems should be built and managed - using best-of-breed technology and effective management processes. He was kind enough to ask me to join a recent podcast. During the podcast, we had a great conversation about open source search, enterprise...Continue reading

Choosing between Elasticsearch and Solr

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Charlie Hull

One of the questions we're asked all the time is which of the two most popular open source search engines is best for a particular use case - and the answer is always 'it depends'. Broadly speaking, Apache Lucene/Solr and Elasticsearch are very similar in terms of features and performance. If you've already chosen one of them, there's very few reasons to incur the inevitable extra work of switching to the other. However if you're still not sure which to choose, read on. Solr,...Continue reading

Why building an open source search team is hard – and how we can help

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Charlie Hull

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

The four types of open source search project

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Charlie Hull

As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories! Continue reading