Sometimes the best way to explain what something is involves first discussing what it is not, and that’s the tack that Otis Gospodnetic used to open his Day 2 presentation “Search Analytics: What? Why? How” at Lucene Revolution, Day 1.

Here are the slides for this session.

Search analytics” is not search engine optimization (SEO), nor is it exactly the same as Web analytics. Rather, It’s a complement to these functions; search analytics …

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As Josh Tuberville of eHarmony explained in the intro to his talk on Day 1 of Lucene Revolution “Jazzed about Solr: People as a Search Problem” (what a great double entendre the title of this session turns out to be! ), Jazzed.com is a new offering from eHarmony, currently in the final stages of development.

Here are the slides for this session.

“Jazzed wasn’t simply built with Solr. It was built around Solr.” …

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I’ve been doing a lot of talking about how search is about more than finding data; it’s about understanding it. And it might almost be conventional wisdom to suggest that application of search to the big piles of data and content boils down to ‘know thy data’. But add the other vital piece of software insight — ‘know thy user’ — and it gets interesting. Understand that search is not just about queries and indexes …

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The first part of Takahiko Ito’s talk on Day 2 of Lucene Revolution was interesting, but the second half introduced me to a problem — and a serious one — that I hadn’t even known existed.

Slides for this session:

Ito, of Japan’s social network mixi, first described the tool mixi had built, Anuenue, which simplifies the creation of Solr clusters. It’s not yet integrated with Solr Cloud and Zookeeper — that’s one of their …

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By definition, document boosting is anything but a “one size fits all” phenomenon, observes Tim Potter of National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in his talk on “Boosting Documents in Solr by Recency, Popularity, and Personal Preferences” on Day 1 of Lucene Revolution.

Slides for this session.

Tim’s talk outlined a number of innovative and improved approaches to boosting documents in Solr by age and popularity. He also covered document filtering based on user preferences. For …

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Maybe you’ve heard pundits say that in the next year, humans will create more data than in all of human history. The problem with those predictions, Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk said in his keynote to Day 2 of Lucene Revolution, is that they’re true.

Here are the slides for this session:

Ultimately, he says, that is the reason we have gone from “The answer is a relational database. Now what is the question?” to what …

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I’m a web application developer. I am not going to pretend that I understood everything that Simon Willnauer was saying at his talk on Column Stride Fields, or DocValues, on day 1 of Lucene Revolution. That’s because, as a rule, I don’t have a need to climb into the guts of Lucene in order to get good results. And that’s exactly what I like about it. If you tell me, “under these circumstances, define …

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In a lot of ways, Travelocity’s talk at Day 1 of Lucene Revolution was three talks in one, but they all come back to the same conclusion: by using Solr, Travelocity is able to provide a better experience for their users.

Here are the slides for this session:

OK, that sounds a little like marketing hype, but listening to Sudhakara Karegowdra and Esteban Donato speak, you realize pretty quickly just how complicated Travelocity’s system really …

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On the eve of Lucene Revolution, we offered the first public kickoff of the Lucid Certification for Solr/Lucene Developers. A bunch of folks took the test, and Josette Rigsby of CMSWire talked to some of them here at the conference:

She goes on to mention how the exam combines challenges and opportunities:

• The exam is hard
• Merely studying for the exam has value as a learning tool
• The certification will help the open

…

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If you hang around the topic of search long enough, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that “real time search” is the Holy Grail, or at least something close to it. And there’s a good reason for that; unfindable data is just dead.

Today, Day 1 of Lucene Revolution 2011, Boris Aleksandrovsky talked about how Yammer solves the problem with an interesting architecture that sends updates to a dependency manager, and then a cache that’s …

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