Caching In Elasticsearch
Responding to queries takes CPU time, memory, and in unfortunate cases, wall time as well. Increasing the power of a cluster helps, over-provisioning can be very expensive. Caching is…
Is Your Infrastructure Ready For Learning To Rank?
In previous articles, we introduced Learning to Rank (LTR) for Elasticsearch 1, 2, which uses machine learning to re-score the best documents in a query. On the surface, it…
Optimizing User-Product Matching Marketplaces
The key to really understanding search, recommendations, and other ‘product matching’ systems is microeconomics. Say what!?!? No hear me out. In this article, I want to challenge you to…
Heatmaps in Elasticsearch
Heatmap facets are a powerful demonstration of Solr’s geospatial capabilities. Given a corpus of indexed shapes, a heatmap facet will show you where the results of your query fit…
Using Splainer to Debug Complex Solr Function Queries
In complex Solr relevance work, I find I create a fair amount of function queries to boost & balance results. Solr function queries look like Excel queries from hell….
When to choose open source search (and when you shouldn’t)
In my role as search consultant, I spend a lot of time helping organizations pick the right search technology. Will it be Solr or Elasticsearch? Algolia or Swifttype? Endeca…
Test Driving Elasticsearch Learning to Rank with a Linear Model
Last time, I created a simple linear model using three ranking signals. Using TMDB movie data, I came up with a naive model that computed a relevance score from…
Learning to Rank 101 — Linear Models
Many search nerds get an instinct they want to “learn the right boosts” to apply to their queries. Search often feels like whack-a-mole, and often folks say “if I…
Trey Grainger Chats about Solr and Lucene Revolution Part. 2
Trey is SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks and the co-author of Solr in Action. He sat down with Doug Turnbull and Matt Overstreet in December of last year to…
What is Learning To Rank?
As an engineer, artificial intelligence (AI) is cool. Spaceships and science fiction cool. There has been a lot of attention around machine learning and artificial intelligence lately. Some of…
Solr UTF-8 Character Handling
Searching for non-ASCII characters can be a challenge. There are a number of reasons for doing so, even in a primarily English corpus: Accented characters in names and words…
We’re Bringing Learning to Rank to Elasticsearch
It’s no secret that machine learning is revolutionizing many industries. This is equally true in search, where companies exhaust themselves capturing nuance through manually tuned search relevance. Mature search…