Using Splainer to Debug Complex Solr Function Queries
In complex Solr relevance work, I find I create a fair amount of function queries to boost & balance results. Solr function queries look like Excel queries from hell….
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…
Test Driving Elasticsearch Learning to Rank with a Linear Model
Last time, I created a simple linear model using three ranking signals. Using TMDB movie data, I came up with a naive model that computed a relevance score from…
Learning to Rank 101 — Linear Models
Many search nerds get an instinct they want to “learn the right boosts” to apply to their queries. Search often feels like whack-a-mole, and often folks say “if I…
Trey Grainger Chats about Solr and Lucene Revolution Part. 2
Trey is SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks and the co-author of Solr in Action. He sat down with Doug Turnbull and Matt Overstreet in December of last year to…
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…
Solr UTF-8 Character Handling
Searching for non-ASCII characters can be a challenge. There are a number of reasons for doing so, even in a primarily English corpus: Accented characters in names and words…
We’re Bringing Learning to Rank to Elasticsearch
It’s no secret that machine learning is revolutionizing many industries. This is equally true in search, where companies exhaust themselves capturing nuance through manually tuned search relevance. Mature search…
Trey Grainger Chats about Solr and Lucene Revolution Part. 1
Trey is SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks and the co-author of Solr in Action. He sat down with Doug Turnbull and Matt Overstreet in December of last year to…
Our Solution to Solr Multiterm Synonyms: The Match Query Parser
You have probably heard us talk about Solr multiterm synonyms a lot! It’s a big problem that prevents a lot of organizations from getting reasonable search relevance out of…
OpenBadges: Currently dragging me through the trough of disillusionment
For years I’ve been interested in describing what makes someone special by looking at the ambient data that surrounds them. My first big effort was way back in 2008…
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…