As many others have noted, Google have recently announced their Google Search Appliance (GSA) will not be available for sale from 2017. Search gurus Miles Kehoe and Martin White have written an insightful analysis of the move with some recommendations as to what to do - because your GSA will simply stop working once the 2-year license expires. I don't agree with Lauren...
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In my last blog post, I demonstrated how to set up and configure Solr to use the new XJoin search components we've developed for the BioSolr project, using an example from an e-commerce setting. This time, I'll show...
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In this blog post I want to introduce you to a new Apache Solr plugin component called XJoin. I'll show how we can use this to solve a common problem in e-commerce - how to use price discount data, provided by an external web API, to either filter the results of a product search or boost scores. A further post will show another example, using click-through data to influence the score of subsequent searches.
We've been working with Big Data for many years - let us help you capture, store, index, search and visualise it!
Flax provide Big Data consulting services; we can design, architect and create Big Data platforms and help you deal with the challenges of large scale, for example tuning indexing performance, automatic deployment across cloud hosting and implementing powerful and intuitive user interfaces. In Read more
This month's London Text Analytics Meetup, hosted by Bloomberg in their spectacular Finsbury Square offices, was only the second such event this year, but crammed in three great talks and attracted a wide range of people from both academia and business. We started with Gabriella Kazai o...
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It's been a very busy few months for events - so busy that it's quite a relief to be back in the office! Back in late November I travelled to Vienna to speak at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress with our client Infomedia about how we've helped them to migrate their media monitoring platform from the elderly, unsupported and hard to scale Read more
The latest version of Luwak, our open-source streaming query engine, has been released on the Sonatype Nexus repository and will be making its way to Maven Central in the next few hours. Here's a summary of the new features and improvements we've made:
Batch processing
I...
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Earlier this year an e-commerce company asked us to look into how they should improve how they tested their website search queries. A relatively simple task you might think - but the company concerned has a turnover of over a billion pounds with at least half of this via digital channels, so measuring how well search works is essential to preserve revenue. Like (I suspect) many others, they were recording the results of thousands of test searches, carried out manually by their s...
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Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic.
Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...
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