Conference Recap: Defcon
Last week I went to Defcon, the premiere security conference that attracted 15,000 security experts and Will Smith to Las Vegas. Here are a few lessons I learned hanging…
Understanding How CQL3 Maps to Cassandras Internal Data Structure
CQL3 appears to be the newly ordained, canonical, and best-practices means of interacting with Cassandra. Indeed, the Apache Cassandra documentation itself declares that the Thrift API as “legacy” and…
Understanding How CQL3 Maps to Cassandra’s Internal Data Structure: Sets, Lists, and Maps
Refer to my previous post for more in depth details into what Im doing here. This is just a quick reference regarding how Cassandra sets, lists, and maps work…
Improve search relevancy by telling Solr exactly what you want
Please find my piece of hay! To be successful, (e)dismax relies on avoiding a tricky problem with it’s scoring strategy. As we’ve discussed, dismax scores documents by taking…
Tomorrow is Semantic Day at OpenSource Connections
Tim Berners-Lee original vision was for the web is what we today call the Semantic Web: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable ofanalyzing…
Multiple Objective Search Scoring
Over the past few years as Ive worked with search, and Solr in particular, I have witnessed a commonly recurring problem associated with multiple objective search and how documents…
Friend Recommendations using MapReduce
So Jonathan, one of our interns this summer, asked an interesting question today about MapReduce. He said, “Lets say you download the entire data set of whos following who…
Getting Dissed by Dismax – Why your incorrect assumptions about dismax/edismax are hurting search relevancy
In the competition between field scores, theres little fairness. When you learn about the dismax query parser for the first time, one of the first things you learn about…
Coming Soon to State Decoded
Updated 8/19/2017 to fix web links State codes are wretched. Seriously, look at a few: California’s, New York’s, Illinois’, and Texas’ are all good examples of how stunningly difficult…
Getting Started with Cassandra: Overview
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting a 4-part series introduction to Cassandra. This series will take you through all of the basic components of setting up…
Lockdown Solr with IIS as a Reverse Proxy
We’ve been developing rich client-side applications that talk directly to Solr’s HTTP interface from Javascript – requiring a publicly accessible Solr. One concern that you’ll naturally have with Solr…
Advanced Suggest-As-You-Type with Solr
In my previous post, I talked about implementing Search-As-You-Type using Solr. In this post Ill cover a closely related functionality called Suggest-As-You-Type. Heres the use case: A user comes…