Vespa vs Lucene: First Impressions
As we learn more about Vespa, we wanted to give our initial impressions when comparing to Lucene-based search (Solr/Elasticsearch). This is based on initial passes with Vespa and our…
Caching In Elasticsearch
Responding to queries takes CPU time, memory, and in unfortunate cases, wall time as well. Increasing the power of a cluster helps, over-provisioning can be very expensive. Caching is…
Solr UTF-8 Character Handling
Searching for non-ASCII characters can be a challenge. There are a number of reasons for doing so, even in a primarily English corpus: Accented characters in names and words…
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…
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…
Thoughts on Algolia (vs Solr & Elasticsearch)
After getting cranky on one Algolia blog post, and having a Search Disco episode with Julien Lemoine CTO of Algolia, I’m left fascinated by the solution. Algolia, so…
How to use Luwak to run preset queries against incoming documents
Overview Quite a while ago Flax released Luwak as a document monitoring and alerting library. It was designed to solve the problem of running a lot of predetermined queries…
Recap of Lucene Revolution 2015 in Austin
Every one of us at OSC looks forward to Lucene Revolution. It’s one of the few conferences we attend where everyone understands search at a deep level. That means…
BM25 The Next Generation of Lucene Relevance
There’s something new cooking in how Lucene scores text. Instead of the traditional “TF*IDF,” Lucene just switched to something called BM25 in trunk. That means a new scoring formula…
Recap of VLDS Insights Conference
VLDS Insights Conference Recap Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the VLDS Insights conference. VLDS is the Virginia Longitudinal Data System, which provides researchers and policy makers anonymized…
“Relevant Search” Chapters 4 and 5 Now Available!
We’re pleased to announce that Chapters 4 and 5 are available for early access for Relevant Search! Please read and give us feedback. This is early access for a…
Log Every Document Added To Solr
I often want to intercept the complete Solr updates sent to Solr in a format I can use offline. Clients have complex ingestion systems. I shouldn’t need to have…