Solr Multiterm Synonyms: avoiding sow=false surprises
Many Solr teams have gotten stumped on the sow=false behavior introduced in Solr 7. To review, sow=false (split-on-whitespace=false) changes how the query is parsed. With sow=false the query is…
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…
Solr Synonyms and Taxonomies: Mea Culpa
I screwed up! Mea Culpa. Let he who is without synonyms throw the first rock! In my talk Taxonomical Semantical Magical Search, I presented an index-time hypernym/hyponym expansion solution….
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…
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…
What is Learning To Rank?
As an engineer, artificial intelligence (AI) is cool. Spaceships and science fiction cool. There has been a lot of attention around machine learning and artificial intelligence lately. Some of…
Patterns for Elasticsearch Synonyms: Taxonomies and Managed Vocabularies
Last time on the Young and the Synonomous we discussed how users often think of key phrases like “heart attack” or “cardiac arrest” as single terms. We demonstrated how…
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…
Why I think search engines are the future of recommendation systems
Recommendation systems have often felt like costly endeavours that require machine learning expertise and large amounts of infrastructure. Search, on the other hand, increasingly feels like a commodity with…
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…
Relevant Search, Published!
Buy now with a discount! Use offer code mlturnbulllt to get 50% off for a limitted time! Elasticsearch and Solr devs take note: our book, Relevant Search is out….