The Failure of Search at FedBizOpps
The United States government procures most of its goods and services through competitive bidding. The notices of its requirements are posted on a centralized website called FedBizOpps, www.fbo.gov. Contracting…
HIMSS HealthIT Wrapup
After a couple of exhausting days at HIMSS last week, where I was overwhelmed both by being a first time visitor to the glitz of Las Vegas and the…
OSC Launches http://www.smallbizcontracting.com
At OpenSource Connections, we focus on solving the search problems that others face. One of the problems that we have noticed is that tools for U.S. government acquisition officers…
An Introduction to Results Utility Positioning
When a user enters in a search query and is taken to a search engine results page, then the probability of clicking on a result is a function of…
Talking Solr in Las Vegas, February 22, 2012 7:00 PM
Do you like Solr? Live in Las Vegas? Are you going to be in Vegas on Wednesday, February 22, 2012? Like free dinner? If this sounds like you, then…
Patent Troll Shows Need To Improve Search To Disprove
As the “father of the Internet,” Tim Berners-Lee, got onto a plane to head to the burgeoning tech center of Tyler, Texas (all sarcasm intended), he must have wondered…
Why use a Javascript interface for Solr?
Richer presentation. Deeper data in search results. Search UIs are getting richer and more interesting by the day. Google page snapshots, animated disclosures of richer data on mouse over,…
Indexing Chinese in Solr
Recently, we had a project where we helped a client index a corpus of Chinese language documents in Solr. We have asked Dan Funk, a committer to Project Blacklight…
Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server Published
We are pleased to announce that Eric Pugh and David Smiley have published the second Solr book in publication, Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server. It is an update…
You Dont Know Zipf About Your Landing Pages
Unless you have a very well-known brand where people type your URL to visit your site, then chances are that most of your traffic comes from an external search…
Netflix, Qwikster, and the Potential Failure of Search User Experience
Yesterday, Netflix announced the separation of its DVD-by-mail division into a new entity called Qwikster. The new company will have a separate website and focus entirely on mail delivery…
Search Engine Testing and Apache Lucene Eurocon Oh My!
Eric Pugh got notified today that hes been accepted to speak on “Better Search Engine Testing” at the 2011 Apache Lucene Eurocon. So, what, you may ask, does search…