It’s looking like a busy Autumn for search events – first, I’m presenting at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014 in Washington DC on November 5th, talking about ‘Turning Search Upside Down with open source software’. I’ll be describing how we’ve replaced various underperforming, big name closed source search engines with faster & more scalable open source technology, including our own Luwak stored query engine. Do let me know if you’re in DC, I’d be very happy to meet up. The week after this is Lucene Revolution, which sadly we won’t be attending this year, but it is recommended if you’re interested in Lucene and Solr.
Towards the end of November there’s Search Solutions, a great day of presentations about all aspects of search held at the British Computer Society in Covent Garden. This year Tom Mortimer from Flax will be presenting some research we’ve done into performance comparisons between Lucene/Solr and Elasticsearch, and there are also presentations from Thomson Reuters, the British Library, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. I highly recommend this event, it’s always worth attending.
We’re also starting a new Meetup in London, a group for users of Apache Lucene/Solr (there’s an Elasticsearch London user group but strangely no equivalent for the other popular stack). Our first event is on November 28th, kindly hosted by Bloomberg (who are no strangers to Lucene/Solr themselves) and featuring Shalin Mangar, a Lucene/Solr committer from Lucidworks who is visiting Europe that week. We’re hoping that we can run these events every few months, but we need help from the community, so if you could talk, sponsor or host the Meetups do let us know.
In December we’ll be holding another Cambridge Search Meetup and will be talking about our work with the European Bioinformatics Institute on the BioSolr project – the date to be confirmed. Busy times!
