I visited Aberdeen before Easter to speak at Industry Day, a part of the European Conference on Information Retrieval. Following a reception at Aberdeen's Town House (a wonderful building) hosted by the Lord Provost I spent an evening with various information retrieval luminaries including Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex. We had a chance to discuss the book we're co-authoring (draft title 'Searching the Enterprise', designed as a review of t...
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Last week we ran a hackday for Full Fact, hosted by Facebook in their London office. We had planned to gather a room full of search experts from our London Lucene/Solr Meetup and around twenty people attended from a range of companies including Bloomberg, Alfresc...
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Last week I spoke at the Big Data London conference, a very busy event with several thousand people attending. My session was on using open source search to make sense of Big Data - you can get slides here.
In the evening we ran another Read more
Over the years we've dealt with quite a few migration projects where the query syntax of the client's existing search engine must be preserved. This might be because other systems (or users) depend on it, or a large number of stored expressions exist and it is difficult or uneconomic to translate them all by hand. Our usual approach is to write a query parser, which understands the current syntax but creates a Read more
The rise of Apache Kafka as a streaming data solution is something we've been watching for a while - as part of a collection of Big Data tools, it provides a 'TiVo for data' feature. We've begun to use it in client projects covering both search and log analysis...
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We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...
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We've been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as 'Big Data' solutions - here's a quick overview of them.
The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by D...
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Last night I dropped in on the Unified Log Meetup at JustEat's offices (of course, they provided lots of pizza for us all!). I've written about this Meetup before - as a rule the events cover logging and analytics at massive scale, with search being only part of the picture.
Joseph Francis from Read more
Highly scalable stored search and media monitoring with open source software
Flax builds high-performance media monitoring systems using our own open source library, Luwak. Simply put, it allows you to define a set of search queries and then monitor a stream of documents for any that might match these queries: a function also known as 'reverse search' and 'document routing'. Based on the powerful Apache Lucene library, it can be used to build monitoring and classification systems that ...
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Infomedia A/S are Denmark's leading provider of media intelligence. Flax assisted Infomedia with a complete redesign of their search and monitoring platform, migrating from the closed-source Autonomy IDOL and Verity software to Apache Solr and the Flax monitor, the latter based on our Luwak library. We presented our work together at the world's largest media monitoring conference ...
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