Our Experts

Charlie Hull

UK Director & Marketing Director
Expertise
  • Relevancy
  • Solr
  • Elasticsearch
  • Search Strategy
  • Open Source

Charlie Hull is the Marketing Director at OSC and also leads client projects. He keeps a strategic view on developments in the search industry and is in demand as a speaker at conferences across the world. Charlie writes regularly on search issues and runs the London Lucene/Solr Meetup. Charlie co-founded Flax in 2001, the UK’s leading open source search company and now part of OpenSource Connections.

He holds a BEng in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester and has been an electronic engineer developing high-spec test equipment for the professional sound industry, a software engineer working on both embedded and PC applications, a team leader, project manager and application developer and an independent software consultant. While at Webtop he helped lead a team that developed a half-billion-page internet search engine and he was Managing Director at Flax, working with clients across the world to build high performance, accurate and relevant search applications.

Charlie co-authored Searching the Enterprise with Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex, part of the Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval series published by Now Publications. The book was reviewed by Martin White of Intranet Focus who said “There are of course many books on information retrieval… but Searching the Enterprise is in a class of its own”. Charlie is also a member of the Search Network, an independent group of search professionals who release regular free reports on search issues and an Ambassador at OpenUK, a not for profit organisation for the business of Open Technology in the UK.