This year's Enterprise Search Europe was held near Victoria train station in London and unfortunately coincided with a two day strike on the London Underground - worrying for the organisers, but apart from a few notable absences it didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. We started with a keynote from Dale Roberts, whose Continue reading
At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading
Matt Pearce writes: We recently released UKMP, a search application built on work done on last year's Enterprise Search hack day. This presents the tweets of UK Members of Parliament with search options including filtering by party, retweet and favourite count, and entities (people, locations a...Continue reading
Yesterday was the always interesting Search Solutions one day conference held by the BCS IRSG in London, a mix of talks on different aspects of search. The first presentation was by Behshad Behzadi of Google on Conversational Search, where he showed a speech-capable search in...Continue reading
Matt Pearce, who joined the Flax team earlier this year, writes: A recent client wished to convert documents to and from Microsoft Office formats, using a web form as an intermediate step for editing the content. The documents were read in, imported to a Solr search engine, and could then be searched over, cloned, edited and transformed in batches, before being exported to Office once more. The cont...Continue reading
Last night the London Search Meetup returned after a year's absence: it's great to see it back. The venue was at St Pancras with the room overlooking Eurostar trains and statues, inside the beautifully restored station building. The speakers were both there to talk about their recent books: prolific author Martin White of Intranet Focus has written a book on Enterprise Search with the strapline 'Enhancing Business Performance'. Martin ha...Continue reading
Last Thursday I spent the day at the British Computer Society's Search Solutions event, run by their Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Unlike some events I could mention, this isn't a forum for sales pitches, over-inflated claims or business speak - just some great presentations on all aspects of search and some lively networking or discussion. It's one of my favourite events of t...Continue reading
The Cambridge Enterprise Search Meetup last night featured Francis Rowland of the European Bioinformatics Institute and Rob Stacey of TrueKnowledge, in a newly refurbished venue. Thanks to all those who came and it was good to meet some new faces. Francis talked about how search user interfaces should...Continue reading
Here's the second writeup. We started after lunch with a talk from Flavio Junqueira of Yahoo! on web search engine cacheing. He talked both about the various things that can be cached (query results, term lists and document data) and the pros and cons of dynamic versus static caching. His work has focused on the former, with a decoupled approach - i.e. the cache doesn't automatically know what's cha...Continue reading
Another excellent evening as part of the Enterprise Search London Meetup series; very busy as usual. Amir Dotan started us off with details of his work in designing user interfaces for the financial services sector, describing some of the challenges involved in designing for a high-pressure and highly regulated environment. Although he didn't talk about search specifically we hear...Continue reading
