Lucid Imagination founder Marc Krellenstein kicked off the Lucene Revolution yesterday with a keynote address covering the history of search. Here are the slides, followed by some highlights:
Much as we might think of search technology as a 21st century internet thing, its back to when IBM was sued by the US government. By the early days of the Internet, search—Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, and Alta Vista–began to accelerate the virtuous cycle of requirements and innovation. …
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Imagine that you have to integrate and search data from 200 different sources, each of which uses a different structure (if they use a structure at all). Your data may be incomplete, the same information is represented in different ways by different sources, and it’s often vague. Oh, and if a user can’t find the correct result using a simple Google-like search, someone may literally get away with murder.
Welcome to Ronald Mayer’s world. In …
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It wasn’t the biggest lesson learned from Alberto Mijares’ talk on Day 2 of Lucene Revolution, but the notion that funding issues can lead to a new and successful business model was uplifiting, at the very least.
Slides for this session:
When Mijares’s company, Canoo Engineering AG, met with Swiss newspaper publisher and media group Axel Springer, they all agreed that what Axel Springer needed was to keep readers on the sites of …
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You’ve been hearing me do a lot of talking about finding meaning in data, so it may not come as a surprise that of all the track sessions at Lucene Revolution, perhaps the one I was looking forward to the most was the one I attended last, “Lots of Facets, Fast“, from Anne Veling.
Here are the slides for this session.
OK, so the title may not seem all that revolutionary, but it’s …
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“Metadata is king!” Thus proclaimed Steve Kearns of Basis Technology, Platinum Sponsor of Lucene Revolution, at the start of this standing-room-only session on Day 1 of the conference. Why? Because it provides a way to enhance otherwise unstructured data with a considerable amount of structure.
Here are the slides for this session.
With this premise in place, Steve discussed the use and integration of advanced analytics in the document-processing pipeline, focusing on the three levels …
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What a way to start out a conference on using data! Stephen Dunn’s keynote for Day 1 of Lucene Revolution — the Guardian‘s opening up of its content using an API, and how Lucene/Solr was involved in that — was interesting all by itself, but he himself is also a good speaker, engaging the audience. A great way to start the day. Here’s a video clip of his interview:
Stephen Dunn and the Guardian: …
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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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