Trey Grainger Chats about Solr and Lucene Revolution Part. 1
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…
Our Solution to Solr Multiterm Synonyms: The Match Query Parser
You have probably heard us talk about Solr multiterm synonyms a lot! It’s a big problem that prevents a lot of organizations from getting reasonable search relevance out of…
OpenBadges: Currently dragging me through the trough of disillusionment
For years I’ve been interested in describing what makes someone special by looking at the ambient data that surrounds them. My first big effort was way back in 2008…
Patterns for Elasticsearch Synonyms: Taxonomies and Managed Vocabularies
Last time on the Young and the Synonomous we discussed how users often think of key phrases like “heart attack” or “cardiac arrest” as single terms. We demonstrated how…
Patterns for Synonyms in Elasticsearch: Keyphrases
As I almost exclusively help folks with Solr/Elasticsearch search relevance, I often encounter the “giant list of synonyms” that a client has. This list often creates odd side effects…
Traditional Retail: Stop Whining, Start Reverse Showrooming
We’re all familiar with showrooming. It’s the phenomenon where shoppers go to the store, see something they like, then check amazon to see if the item is available. Traditional,…
First Impressions of Apache NiFi
My colleague Scott had been bugging me about NiFi for almost a year, and last week I had the privilege of attending an all day training session on Apache…
BM25F in Lucene with BlendedTermQuery
As part of the London hack days Diego Ceccarelli started a BM25F implementation. I began to continue it at Lucene Revolution’s Lucene hackathon. I realized though that when you…
Building Recommendation Systems with Elastic Graph
As I’ve written about extensively, I strongly believe that search engines are the future of recommendation systems. The biggest reason being cost: today’s search engines require extensive amounts of…
Expanding data from a frequency table into case form in R and STATA
I’ve been learning a bit of R this summer. R is a pretty powerful language and environment used for statistical computing. I chose it because it’s open-source (and therefore…
Why I think search engines are the future of recommendation systems
Recommendation systems have often felt like costly endeavours that require machine learning expertise and large amounts of infrastructure. Search, on the other hand, increasingly feels like a commodity with…
High-Quality Recommendation Systems with Elasticsearch
Did you know technical books can have spoilers? Well ours does 🙂 and so spoiler alert: we close our book, Relevant Search, making an argument that search engine technology…