Choosing your search relevance evaluation metric
Ensuring results are relevant is tricky but critical to a good search experience. Choosing an evaluationmetric to summarize the performance of the search engine can be equally challenging because…
Search Insights 2020, a new report from The Search Network
The Search Network is a group of independent search professionals and companies formed in 2017 as a community of practice. The Network publishes free annual reports covering many different…
Why you should submit a talk to Haystack, the Search Relevance Conference
Most of you will be aware of our Haystack conference, which we currently run in April in Charlottesville, USA and in October in Europe. We’re now in our third…
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…
Demystifying nDCG and ERR
Welcome back, dear reader! In this post, we unwrap the mystery behind two popular search relevance metrics through visualization, and discuss their pros and cons. Our subjects for this…
Haystack Europe 2019, Berlin, Germany, Conference Notes
Greetings! I was very fortunate to attend OpenSource Connections (OSC) Haystack Europe 2019 conference in Berlin, Germany, on October 28th, and below are my notes from the conference. Thank…
Understanding BERT and Search Relevance
There is a growing topic in search these days. The hype of BERT is all around us, and while it is an amazing breakthrough in contextual representation of unstructured…
What happens at a Lucene/Solr Hackday
For the last few years I’ve run free Lucene Hackdays around the same time of year as the largest conference in our open source search sector, Activate (previously known…
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….
Quepid is now an Open Source project!
Today we have flipped the switch to release Quepid as an open source project, licensed under the Apache License v2.0. Come check out the source at http://github.com/o19s/quepid. What is…
Catching MICES in Berlin for e-commerce search
MICES is a one-day, free to attend event held in Berlin just after the Berlin Buzzwords conference – it’s a combination of talks and less formal discussion sessions, run…
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search
105 falsehoods programmers believe about search, a complex field where competence is hard-won through training, practice, and experience.