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…
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,…
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…
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…
Your Recommendation Systems Aren’t As Cool As My Friends
What is more important in a recommendation? That the recommendation is accurate based on my tastes OR That the person making the recommendation is someone I like and respect…
Content expert’s guide to diagnosing site search relevance problems
Most people find site search maddening to manage. How are your users searching? Is search helping or hurting the bottom line? It’s one thing to try a few pet…
Search for Lunch: this search expert will come speak for free at your company’s lunch and learn
I want to share what I know at your company’s lunch and learn! For free! The problem with lunch and learn’s is that everyone’s busy. It’s challenging to find…
Top 7 Mistakes Organizations Make With Search
This article reflects on lessons learned from our book Relevant Search. Readers of this article can use discount code oscrelsearch to get 39% off your purchase! Buy Now After…