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…
Announcing Relevance Cornucopia – How Natural Language Search completes Learning to Rank
In August’s Summer of Relevance we took 19 attendees through intense, small-class search relevance training workshops – including “Think Like a Relevance Engineer” and “Hello LTR – Learning to…
Diversity vs. Relevance in Search Systems
I want to share something powerful I’ve learned from my journey into designing a successful search ranking systems; an area I don’t think most search practitioners are really thinking…
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…
Zookeeper Resiliency for Solr Cloud in AWS, using Auto-Scaling Groups
We’re very happy to present a guest blog by Alex Addison, Senior Developer at LexisNexis UK. Alex’s team will be presenting a talk on some of their work at…
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search
105 falsehoods programmers believe about search, a complex field where competence is hard-won through training, practice, and experience.
Lets Stop Saying ‘Cognitive Search’
I consume a lot of search materials: blogs, webinars, papers, and marketing collateral. There’s a consistent theme that crops up over the years: buzzwords! I understand why this happens,…
Summer of Relevance: Tickets Available!
Did you miss Haystack? This summer, we’ll be fulfilling our mission of empowering search teams, showing you how it’s done with 100% open source tools, by holding a full…
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Collocations
Recently while experimenting with word2vec-based features with Learning to Rank, I was exploring using collocations to improve the accuracy of my embeddings. If you read the original word2vec paper…
Solr Json API Tutorial
Edismax is the query parser-of-choice for many Solr applications. The default behaviors are correct for a wide range of use cases. The syntax has become familiar. While edismax has…