WEBINAR: Take Control of Your Search Destiny:
Migrating to Apache Solr/Lucene Open Source Search

Hosted by KMWorld and featuring speakers from The Motley Fool

Click here to view the webinar or download the slides

As today’s business landscape changes, more and more companies want control over their search to take on the rapid acceleration in scale and diversity of their data and documents. But legacy commercial search applications can add hidden costs and constraints, and make it difficult to innovate…

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Come visit us at the Lucene Meetup at ApacheCon on Tuesday 11/3 from 8-10pm. All are welcome to come – there is no cost for this event. Come meet many of the key contributors to Lucene and Solr. Sponsored by Lucid Imagination.

Location: Marriott Oakland City Center, Rooms 1&2

For more information about the meetup, visit
http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneAtApacheConUs2009

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A big chunk of the billions that go to search-engine marketing and search engine optimization, SEM and SEO, (mostly to you-know-who) are spent on getting to Page 1 of the results.

I won’t be the first to point out that relevance for in-house search — i.e., without using Pagerank — is a harder nut to crack. How much harder? A recent study from Aberdeen Group, publicized this week in Information Week, provides the following stat:

At…

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First, major kudos to the JavaZone team for putting on one of the most impressive conferences I’ve attended and had the honor at which to speak.  From the tasty and hearty speakers dinner to Carl delivering my post-talk absent mindedly forgotten power cable to my hotel, the organizers put on a very well organized and classy event.  The conference not only sported top notch technical content from the best of the best speakers (some of my…

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I’ll be giving a talk at the upcoming JavaZone being held in Oslo, Norway September 9 and 10th. Here’s a brief abstract of the talk:

Solr is a star in the enterprise search world, powering very popular ecommerce systems, content management systems, and many other internal and externally facing search systems throughout the world. This presentation will show you the power and ease of use of Solr in a fast…

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Weird title, I know, but they are my pet names (there probably are better terms for them in use elsewhere) for two techniques I find often help people solve search problems in the real world, but don’t necessarily seem like good things to do at first glance.

Fake Queries

If you’ve ever attended on of my trainings, you know I’m fond of saying “Just because a user types words into a search box, doesn’t mean you have…

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eWeek.com recently posted a nice article by Dr. Yves Schabes, founder of Teragram, on how to make enterprise search better through some higher order processing techniques like metadata generation, applying taxonomies, etc. and doing relevance testing on a regular basis.  Naturally, this got me thinking about all the different ways this relates to the Apache Lucene ecosystem (Lucene, Solr, Mahout, Tika, etc.) and Lucid Imagination.

First, by choosing an open backbone like Lucene and Solr, you are free…

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Recently, Uwe Schindler and others have added a new capability to Lucene and Solr to make working with numeric ranges a lot faster.  I haven’t tried out this new functionality yet, so I thought I would walk through it here and explore it’s capabilities.

Since Lucene treats most everything as Strings, encoding  numbers and dates and then utilizing them in ranges has always required a little extra work to make it perform well.  Previously, one would…

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We invite you to a webinar featuring Erik Hatcher, Lucene/Solr Committer and co-author of Lucene In Action. Erik will show you how you can build a search engine from scratch using Solr, the Lucene Open Source Search Engine.Take in a variety data sources, and end up with a usable web interface all in a matter of minutes! Data sources will include a relational database, column separated (such as a spreadsheet) data, rich…

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I was at a company a while back that was considering replacing a commercial vendor with a Lucene/Solr based solution.  At this company, they paid a good chunk of money for the commercial solution and we were discussing the (de)merits of the system.  Way back when, their primary purchase motivation was they wanted a “shrink wrap” product with the peace of mind of a company behind the product (they bought their system pre-Lucid) and money…

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