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Welcome René Kriegler to our growing European search team

We’re very pleased to announce that René Kriegler will be joining OpenSource Connections to head up our e-commerce practice, based in our new office in Berlin, Germany.

René has been a close partner of OSC for many years, bringing his deep expertise of open source search and particularly e-commerce search to the team. He’s the creator and lead maintainer of Querqy, a powerful library for query rewriting compatible with both Solr and Elasticsearch, and also co-founder and organiser of the annual MICES (Mix-Camp E-commerce Search). You’ll have seen him speak at our Haystack conference, Berlin Buzzwords and many other events, you might have been trained by him on our Think Like a Relevance Engineer course or read his recent blogs. Over the last year or so René has been collaborating with OSC’s co-founder Eric Pugh and others on Chorus, a reference implementation for an open source e-commerce search engine. With his background in linguistics René has a unique understanding of what it takes to build powerful and relevant search.

Join us and work on cutting-edge search

Our new European office will help us work more closely with clients in the EU – we expect our team based there to grow significantly over the next few years. We’re already helping some large European companies own their search. If you want to work with René and the rest of the OSC team on some of the hardest search problems for some of the world’s leading companies we’re now recruiting – check out our EU and our US career opportunities.

Own your e-commerce search

With René’s help we also expect to significantly expand our work in e-commerce search – an area that has become increasingly important over recent years as commerce moves online. Too often, the search available on web shops is slow, innaccurate, unsatisfying and actively drives customers away. Using our Proven Process, we aim to empower e-commerce search teams with advice, knowledge sharing, training and team augmentation, to help them build solutions that drive their business forward, giving them back control of search using open source software. A number of our clients in the USA and Europe are already using the Chorus stack to put powerful, open source tools in the hands of the search team, letting them actively measure and improve search quality.

If you would like to improve search on your site, you can download our free Guide to Better E-commerce Site Search which includes a simple self-assessment tool, watch our talks on why e-commerce search is broken, or read our blogs on e-commerce search KPIs and follow the Pete the Product Manager series to see how to tune e-commerce search in practice.

Contact us today to discuss your project with René and the team.