Jeff Zemerick
Category: Community
On September 21, 2022, I had the privilege of attending and speaking at Amazon Web Services’ inaugural OpenSearchCon in Seattle, WA. It was a one day event focused entirely on OpenSearch, its users, and use-cases. At the conference, attendees got to hear from a variety of speakers on topics ranging from the Lucene internals of OpenSearch to how OpenSearch is being used for log analytics.
From the speakers and interactions with other attendees, it is apparent OpenSearch is being used a lot for log analytics, tracing, and telemetry management. OpenSearch is great at these things! I and my colleagues at OpenSource Connections believe OpenSearch is also great for document search. We demonstrated this belief to the audience by announcing support for OpenSearch in our Splainer and Quepid tools.
Splainer provides an easy to use interface for going through search results when tuning relevance. Splainer is very helpful when you are working on search improvement experiments and want to iterate quickly. Quepid is a search relevancy workbench to aid you with capturing human judgments of search results. Use Quepid when you want to identify a search relevance baseline performance to begin improving. Splainer and Quepid both support Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, and now OpenSearch!
My talk at OpenSearchCon was titled “How organizations can get the most from their OpenSearch contributions.” From many of the speakers we heard how users can contribute to OpenSearch through code, documentation, and community support. I wanted to focus on how a contributor can maximize their benefits from contributing to OpenSearch through the growth of their personal and organizational reputation, the spark even a small contribution can have in project innovation, and how contributions can be marketed to the public.
A consistent top reason organization’s hesitate to adopt an open source project is due to the fear of the lack of support. We, as a community, can work to remove this barrier to open source adoption by not ending our contributions with a git merge. Stick with the project and support your contribution through code updates and community interactions.
Join us on the community Relevance Slack in the #opensearch channel to talk about all things search relevance with OpenSearch! If you are using OpenSearch and want to improve the relevance for your search results get in touch with myself or my colleagues at OpenSource Connections.