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…
Tika Tuesdays: Parsing Tika & Tesseract formatted HOCR output inside Solr ingestion pipeline
In our first couple of posts, we ended up doing a lot of the processing work outside of Solr. It gave me a chance to polish my PowerShell skills,…
What is a ‘Relevant’ Search Result?
Summary Search relevance expert Doug Turnbull revisits the concept of search relevance, exploring why people disagree on what makes results relevant. Using “Rocky” vs “Rocky Horror Picture Show” as…
Tesseract 3 and Tika
Tesseract 4 is a major upgrade to this venerable OCR library, incorporating neural networks and lots of other great improvements, but not everyone has upgraded to it (including one…
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…
A noob’s guide to indexing data with Solr’s classic schema
Intro I joined OSC a month ago as their first data-scientist, so I’ve been drinking from a firehose trying to get up to speed on Solr. After breezing through…
What Should Your Search Document Be?
In a search engine, the “document” is the basic unit of indexing and retrieval. It’s the “result” on the search results screen when a user enters a query. Many…
Tika Tuesdays: Using Tika and Tesseract as an API exposed by Solr
Don’t want to deploy a separate Tika server? But need Tika server-like capabilities and you already have Solr? Then this is the solution for you! What I am going…
Tika Tuesday: Using Tika and Tesseract outside of Solr
Extracting content from file formats using Tika as a standalone service is the traditional architectural approach, and what my most recent project is built around. You can try out…
It’s time for Tika Tuesdays!
What is Tika Tuesdays? Over the past few months I’ve finally accomplished the long time personal goal of being able to easily search PDF documents with in context hit…
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…