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.
Test-driven search relevance tuning – for free!
As you may know OpenSource Connections has a commitment to search relevance that goes beyond our expert consultancy and training – we genuinely want to build a community of…
Flax has joined OpenSource Connections
Flax has joined OpenSource Connections! On February 1st 2019 Flax’s Managing Director Charlie Hull joined OpenSource Connections (OSC), Flax’s long-standing US partner, as a senior Managing Consultant. Charlie manages…
Why Haystack? Democratizing Search Relevance!
We’re proud to be putting on another Haystack in late April. But why? A few people have asked me why we need another search conference? What’s the purpose behind…
Exploring Solr’s OpenNLP Integrations
We’ve focused most of our conversation about machine learning and search on Learning to Rank (LTR), but LTR isn’t the only machine learning tool in the Solr/Elasticsearch toolbox. LTR…
Sub-phrase Highlighting in Solr
We wanted Solr to use its ability to do subphrase matching (pf2, pf3) to procedurally generate richer, contiguous highlighting snippets. Unfortunately, we reached a dead end in our efforts…
How is search different than other machine learning problems?
Learning to Rank turns search into a machine learning problem. In this article, I want to explore what makes search distinct from other machine learning problems. How does one…