What is a 'Relevant' Search Result?
A relevant search result helps users take further steps, make good decisions, and supports their ability to formulate better, more informed, queries.
Tesseract 3 and Tika
In which we deal with learning that sometimes you don't get to use the latest version of Tesseract...
Demystifying nDCG and ERR
In this post, we unwrap the mystery behind two popular search relevance metrics, and discuss their pros and cons. Our subjects for this exercise are Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain, and Expected Reciprocal Rank, commonly acronymified as nDCG and ERR. We'll start with some refresher background, visualize what these metrics actually look like, and paint a picture of how each can be either helpful or misleading, depending on the situation. Afterwards, you'll have a better understanding of their behavior and which ones to use when (and why).
A noob’s guide to indexing data with Solr’s classic schema
How to convert the _default managed schema in Solr v8.3.0 to the classic schema of yesterday
What Should Your Search Document Be?
We explore what the basic unit of your search system should be. What *should* your document be? What 'result' in the SERP UI best satisfies your users?
Tika Tuesdays: Using Tika and Tesseract as an API exposed by Solr
In which we deploy Tika and Tesseract as a API in Solr, exposed via the /extract handler!
Tika Tuesday: Using Tika and Tesseract outside of Solr
In which we explore how to deploy Tika and Tesseract as a stand alone service. And tie it into Solr via Payloads...
It's time for Tika Tuesdays!
It's time for Tika Tuesdays! Three years ago I started messing around with OCRing documents with Tika, and today that process is relatively straightforward. This weekly series will share what I've learned.
Haystack Europe 2019, Berlin, Germany, Conference Notes
My notes taken during the Haystack EU 2018 in Berlin, Germany, on October 28th.
event
Natural Language Search Training - NLP <3s Search - at Relevance Cornucopia🦃!
Learn to leverage NLP to improve search relevance
training
Hello LTR! Learning to Rank Training at Relevance Cornucopia🦃!
Go hands on with machine learning tools to improve relevance via Learning to Rank
training
Solr 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training! at Relevance Cornucopia🦃!
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Solr!
event
Elasticsearch 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training at Relevance Cornucopia🦃!
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Elasticsearch!
Understanding BERT and Search Relevance
There is a growing topic in search these days. The hype of BERT is all around us, and while it is an amazing breakthrough in contextual representation of unstructured text, newcomers to NLP are left scratching their heads wondering how and why it is changing the field. Many of the examples are tailored for tasks such as text classification, language understanding, multiple choice, and question answering. So what about just plain-old findin' stuff? This article gives an overview into the opportunities and challenges when applying advanced transformer models such as BERT to search.
event
The Right Path To Making Search Relevant at the Regensburg Data Science Meetup
Charlie from OSC will give the inaugural talk at this new Meetup in Southern Germany
training
Solr 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training at Haystack Europe
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Solr!
training
Elasticsearch 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training at Haystack Europe
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Elasticsearch
event
Haystack Europe - The Search Relevance Conference.
Haystack Europe is the conference for improving search relevance. Haystack Europe is the no-holds-barred conference for organizations where search, matching, and relevance really matters to the bottom line.
event
Conversion Models and Query Relaxation at the Berlin Search Technology Meetup
Doug Turnbull talks about Conversion Models: A Systematic Method of Building Learning to Rank Training Data and René Kriegler talks about Query Relaxation.
It's okay to run Tika (and Tesseract!) inside of Solr ;-) If and Only If....
Don't be afraid of running Tesseract and Tika in your Solr cluster if...
event
Payloads and OCR with Solr & Lucene At Scale at the London Lucene/Solr Meetup
Eric & Dan from OSC talk about OCR & Solr Payloads and Florian from Mimecast shows us how to index billions of log lines a day, and the usual Q&A and networking
What happens at a Lucene/Solr Hackday
How we hosted and ran a Lucene Hackday in Washington DC the week of the Activate conference, and what attendees considered and achieved during the day
event
TALMIRI - Talent meets IR Industry
TALMIRI is a symposium to bring together talented early-stage researchers, academics and information retrieval industry with invited speakers in an iconic location in Bedfordshire, UK. Practioners and researchers, in particular but not exclusively PhD/MSc students and early-stage researchers, are invited to present (as poster or demo) their exciting search and information retrieval related work to IR experts and industry. Charlie Hull of OSC will be presenting on Working in Open Source Search, giving attendees an insight into the sort of projects and technology he has dealt with over a 20 year career in search.
Announcing Relevance Cornucopia🦃 - How Natural Language Search completes Learning to Rank
Our next training event, Relevance Cornucopia🦃, we'll add the missing piece to the manual tuning & learning to rank picture: Natural Language Search. Come learn to build relevance that can be both optimized by machine learning AND understands user's natural language.
Diversity vs. Relevance in Search Systems
Search systems struggle to balance diversifying the result set to match likely intents vs ranking against one well understood intent.
event
Washington DC Lucene/Solr Hackday
A day to hack on Lucene, Solr and associated applications and tools with a group of other search enthusiasts
How You Can Use Hello LTR - The Learning to Rank Sandbox
Hello LTR is a framework that lets you plugin your data to easily build and test Learning to Rank models in Solr or Elasticsearch. Try it Out!
training
Hello LTR! Learning to Rank Training
Go hands on with machine learning tools to improve relevance via Learning to Rank
training
Solr 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training!
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Solr!
training
Elasticsearch 'Think Like a Relevance Engineer' Training
Learn to improve search quality from the best experts in the field. From TFIDF, to Semantic Search, to Learning to Rank with Elasticsearch
Quepid is now an Open Source project!
Quepid is now available as an ASL2 licensed open source project!
event
Migration Stories at the London Lucene/Solr Meetup
Brandwatch and LexisNexis tell us about their experiences migrating to Solr, and the usual Q&A and networking
Catching MICES in Berlin for e-commerce search
A review of the Mix Camp E-Commerce Search 2019 held in Berlin, maturity models, offline/online evaluation, ranking & emotion in search
event
Search Relevance Organizational Maturity Model (MICES, Berlin)
Smarter search drives value to your business. Delivering search that matches users to the right content is what you care about. Come and hear Eric Pugh's keynote talk at MICES, Berlin
training
E-commerce Search for Product Managers (MICES, Berlin)
This full day class helps you understand how working on onsite search for e-commerce requires different thinking than other engineering problems. We teach you to measure search quality, take a hypothesis-driven approach to search projects, and safely 'fail fast' towards ever improving business KPIs.
event
It’s a Balloon! A Blimp! No, a Dirigible! Apache Zeppelin: An ETL Engine and Data Science Notebook That Connects Programmers to Data Scientists and Business Analysts! (Berlin Buzzwords)
Eric will share what he’s learned in creating a project structure that will feel at home for both Data Scientists and Engineers using Apache Zeppelin and Docker.
Zookeeper Resiliency for Solr Cloud in AWS, using Auto-Scaling Groups
A guest blog from Alex Addison on how LexisNexis UK are building production-ready infrastructure for Solr using AWS autoscaling groups, Terraform and Zookeeper.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search
Search is a deceptively complex field, where competence is hard-won through training, practice, and experience. In that vein dear friends, I've exhumed the venerable "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" party from 4 years ago to bring you one about, no less, Search.
Lets Stop Saying 'Cognitive Search'
We won't address machine learning illiteracy in search if we can't go beyond buzzwords. We need to teach concrete, specific techniques.
We empower great search teams to achieve their potential
We teach some of the largest organizations how to deliver more accurate, relevant results with Solr and Elasticsearch. If search is core to your value, you should never outsource it.