Meet Pete, the e-commerce search product manager.
Meet Pete. Pete’s in trouble. Pete’s just been hired as Product Manager for Search at electronics retailer Chorus Electronics. His boss, a Vice President, has asked him to build…
What problem does BERT hope to solve for search?
I’m sure if you run in search or NLP circles, you’ve heard of BERT. It’s what Google famously used to improve 1 out of 10 searches, in what they…
Diversity vs. Relevance in Search Systems
I want to share something powerful I’ve learned from my journey into designing a successful search ranking systems; an area I don’t think most search practitioners are really thinking…
How You Can Use Hello LTR – The Learning to Rank Sandbox
Learning to Rank just seems hard. Applying Machine Learning to relevance in Solr or Elasticsearch seems non-trivial, and it seems to require a lot of crufty code and plumbing….
Summer of Relevance: Tickets Available!
Did you miss Haystack? This summer, we’ll be fulfilling our mission of empowering search teams, showing you how it’s done with 100% open source tools, by holding a full…
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Collocations
Recently while experimenting with word2vec-based features with Learning to Rank, I was exploring using collocations to improve the accuracy of my embeddings. If you read the original word2vec paper…
Weather fork-cast: Cloudy with a chance of Elasticsearch
There have been some interesting moves by cloud computing providers over the last few weeks with respect to search and relevance, particularly concerning the Elasticsearch open source stack. As…
Relevance Engineering is Here to Stay: Haystack EU 2018 Recap
Thanks Flax and Rene Kriegler for partnering to plan a tremendous Haystack EU event in early October. It was gratifying to see the relevance community come together. I love…
Think AI will solve your search problems? Ask these questions first
It’s understandable to be frustrated with search. You’ve probably heard someone like OSC lecturing you on relevance best practices, taxonomies, metrics, measurement, and more. You’ve probably thought “wow that’s…
Haystack Agenda Announced!
Hey, you know you want to come to this awesome search relevance conference! We’ll have talks from companies like LexisNexis, Wikimedia Foundation, Snagajob, Lucidworks, and Elastic! Talks range from…
Solving The Search Management Minefield in Open Source Search
A common theme in software development is the tension between: Fixing painful bugs now!! Creating tools & practices that let us fix bugs faster (though at some theoretical time…
When to choose open source search (and when you shouldn’t)
In my role as search consultant, I spend a lot of time helping organizations pick the right search technology. Will it be Solr or Elasticsearch? Algolia or Swifttype? Endeca…