The week after I spoke at the Elasticsearch London Meetup with our client Westcoast on how we helped them build a better product search. Westcoast are the UK’s largest privately owned IT supplier and needed a fast and scalable search engine they could easily tune and adjust – we helped them build administration systems allowing boosts and editable synonym lists and helped them integrate Elasticsearch with their existing frontend systems. However, integrating with legacy systems is never a straightforward task and in particular we had to develop our own custom faceting engine for price and stock information. You can find out more in the slides here.

Search Solutions, my favourite search event of the year, was the next day and I particularly enjoyed hearing about Google’s powerful voice-driven search capabilities, our partner UXLab‘s research into complex search strategies and Digirati and Synaptica‘s complimentary presentations on image search and the International Image Interoperability Framework (a standard way to retrieve images by URL). Tessa Radwan of our client NLA media access spoke about some of the challenges in measuring similar news articles (for example, slightly rewritten for each edition of a daily newspaper) as part of the development of the new version of their Clipshare system, a project we’ve carried out over the last year of so. I also spoke on Test Driven Relevance, a theme I’ll be expanding on soon: how we could improve how search engines are tested and measured (slides here).

Thanks to the organisers of all these events for all their efforts and for inviting us to talk: it’s great to be able to share our experiences building search engines and to learn from others.

The post Out and about in search & monitoring – Autumn 2015 appeared first on Flax.

On the 25th I’ll be presenting at the London Elasticsearch Usergroup with our client Westcoast, who we have been helping with an Elasticsearch implementation. Westcoast are a B2B supplier of electronics and white goods with yearly revenues of over £1billion, and we’ve helped them implement a powerful new search engine for their website. E-commerce is one sector where good search is an essential part of driving revenue.

Next, on the 26th I’ll be talking one of my favourite events of the year, the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s Search Solutions, on how we might improve how search engine relevance is tested. I’ll suggest a more formal process of test-based relevance tuning and show some useful tools. Our client NLA media access are also talking about the new Clipshare platform we built on Apache Lucene/Solr.

Do let me know if you’re attending and would like to chat – I’ll also be publishing slides and more information about the projects above soon.

The post Talks: Replacing Autonomy IDOL with Solr, Elasticsearch for e-commerce & relevancy tuning appeared first on Flax.