Build your own Custom Lucene query and scorer
Every now and then we’ll come across a search problem that can’t simply be solved with plain Solr relevancy. This usually means a customer knows exactly how documents should…
Subredis – Keyspaces in Redis
We’ve been using Redis extensively for Quepid, our search relevancy collaboration canvas. Redis is a convenient and efficient way to interact with in-memory data structures. In fact, we’ve been…
Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL come full circle?
Recently, I spoke at NoSQL Matters in Barcelona about database history. As somebody with a history background, I was pretty excited to dig into the past, beyond the hype…
Quick Start with Neo4J using YOUR Twitter Data
When learning a new technology its best to have a toy problem in mind so that youre not just reimplementing another glorified “Hello World” project. Also, if you need…
Parameterizing and Organizing Solr Boosts
One of my clients has some pretty heavy-duty requirements for boosting functions. Its actually right on the boundary of what I think is appropriate for Solr. BUT, while I…
Using Cassandra to Build a Naive Bayes Classifier of Users Based Upon Behavior
In our last post, we found out how simple it is to use Cassandra to estimate ad conversion. Its easy, because effectively all you have to do is accumulate…
Estimating Ad Conversion Rates using Cassandra
Dont let anybody fool you; a good bit of what a data scientist does is a glorified form of counting. And if you had a few billion fingers, you…
Async Solr Queries in Python
I frequently hit the wall of needing to work asynchronously with Solr requests in Python. Ill have some code that blocks on a Solr HTTP request, waits for it…
Adventures in Cross-Site Scripting
Dont cross the streams! One big component of making our search relevancy tool Quepid simple to use is the ability to just paste in a Solr search URL and…
Why is Multi-term synonym mapping so hard in Solr?
There is a very common need for multi-term synonyms. Weve actually run across several use cases among our recent clients. Consider the following examples: Ecommerce: If a customer searches…
Search Quality is about effective Collaboration*
*and Effective Collaboration is about Testing Sales expert not happy about the quality of her search. Shed like a better way to collaborate than yelling at the search devs….
Detecting Reddit Voting Rings Using This Weird Little Data Trick
A wolf in sheeps clothing Wow, so apparently the Reddit community has outed (and as of 15 minutes ago, ousted) colleague Doug Turnbull as the vile spammer that he…