Data Modeling For Search Relevance — Signals and Semantics
Mold your fields to capture their searchable essence Perhaps the biggest relevance mistake you can make is to take content, straight from it’s source, and plop it directly into…
Debugging Solr 5 in Intellij
I recently had to debug Solr 5 to help answer some client questions. With Solr 5, there’s been several fundamental changes to the Lucene/Solr codebase. My previous methods of…
We’re Writing The Book on Search Relevance!
The search bar has crept into your application. Do you know how to extract value out of it? Or is it a dangling afterthought? Search is hard. Yet it’s…
Elasticsearch Cross Field Search Is A Lie
At OpenSource Connections, We Do What We Must, Because We Can In Elasticsearch, searching across multiple fields can be confusing to beginners. This is a tough first step in…
It’s Log! It’s Log! It’s Big, It’s Hyper, It’s Good!
What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs?(thanks OpenClipArt) Have you heard about the HyperLogLog data structure? It sounds something out of science fiction. Something Lt. Cmdr Data certainly…
Do you really need a “NoSQL” Database?
Visit me at Strata! (logo (C) OReilly Media) I’m fortunate enough to have been selected to speak at Strata 2015 in a few weeks on one of my favorite…
Quepid: Write Tests Against Your Search Results
Quepid: Relevancy Solved Update ( March 20,2021 )! This function, while very valuable, wasn’t easily used by most Relevance Engineers, and so we’ve made the painful decision to remove…
Title Search: when relevancy is only skin deep
How do users judge that articles, books, and blog posts are relevant to what they’re searching for? What about you? If you’re searching for an article on ‘Socrates’, what…
Stepwise Date Boosting in Solr
When you want to boost on recency of content (ie more recently published documents before older ones), the Solr function query documentation gives you a basic date boost: boost=recip(ms(NOW,mydatefield),3.16e-11,1,1)…
When click scoring can hurt search relevance – towards better signals processing in search
Have you heard of “click scoring” or “click tracking”? In the context of search click scoring is the method whereby you collect statistics on where users click in their…
Lets Stop Saying “NoSQL”
NoSQL to describe a database makes about as much sense as “NoSedan” to describe a car I say the word “NoSQL” a lot. When I say NoSQL, I tend…
Solving data “variety” with Postgress NoSQL Extensions
Raise your hand if you’ve heard the three “Vs” of Big Data? Velocity – your query/updates are exceptionally fast or large. Your processing the entire twitter feed. Volume –…