A good portion of the appeal of platforms like Lucene/Solr comes from the fact that they let individuals and businesses discover something they didn’t know before. Ninety plus percent of the world’s digital content is unstructured or “dark” data. With conventional search tools, your knowledge of what’s out there is determined by the quality of tags that someone attached to…
An Urgent Need in Search Analytics: A Common Language
Do your friends understand what you do for a living?
Answering that question will increasingly emerge as of the most important issues in search, analytics and Big Data over the next few years. Explaining what we all do for a living, in fact, will likely be one of the primary topics of hallway conversation at the Lucene Revolution developer’s…
Search Engines for the Sciences
The Internet has dramatically increased the volume and ease-of-access to the world’s knowledge.
But in some ways it has also made it more difficult to find a precise answer. A simple search on NaCl on commercial search engines brings up links for the North American Cultural Laboratory, North American Coating Labs and ads for food thickeners.
We are very proud…
Recommendation Engines The Solr Way
Recommendation engines have been a source of web comedy for years. Amazon thinks you’re a 17-year old girl because of Christmas gifts you bought for your daughter while other sites try to steer you to information about Ensure and assisted living.
But recommendation engines are also essential for navigating modern web sites, particularly sprawling e-commerce sites or web properties with…
Stump The Chump And Win A Prize
Got a tough problem with your Solr or Lucene application? Facing challenges that you’d like some advice on? Looking for better approaches to an Solr issue you already solved? Want to win a prize?
Email a description of your problem to stump@lucenerevolution.com and see if you can Stump The Chump. Prizes will be awarded at the discretion of…
Search and The Government: Big Data’s Biggest Opportunity
Big Government and Big Data – it’s a perfect match.
Yes, from certain perspectives, that sounds ominous. But step back for a moment and think about the data and computing needs of the federal and state agencies that aren’t the IRS.
The Department of Agriculture is one the world’s primary repositories on data regarding crops, food production and water reserves.…
Who Will Win: Advanced Search or Big Data?
You can make an argument that the world only really went digital ten years ago.
2002 marked the first year that the amount of information stored on hard drives, CD-ROMs, flash cards and other digital devices surpassed analog technologies like paper, stone tables and record albums. This is according to an article by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez…
Stump The Chump: Meet The Panel
I’m excited to announce the panel members for this year’s Stump The Chump at Lucene Revolution:
- Moderator: Erik Hatcher, Lucid Imagination – Lucene/Solr Committer and co-author of Lucene in Action
- Panel Members:
- Erick Erickson, Lucid Imagination – Lucene/Solr Committer
- Eric Pugh, OpenSource Connections – co-author of Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server
- Grant
…
Lucene Solr Training: Limited Seats Left
Yes, we know what you’re thinking. There’s always room for one more in training sessions.
Well, guess again. The pre-conference training sessions at Lucene Revolution, taking place at the Royal Sonesta in Boston from May 7 through May 10, are filling up fast. A session titled “Scaling Search with Big Data and Solr” has already filled…
How to Search Your Home Library and Other Highlights at Lucene Revolution
Books—from a data retrieval perspective—can be a maddening information source.
Librarians catalog books by author, type and other factors and books typically come with indexes and tables of contents to help readers narrow their search. But what if you’re looking for a particular passage but can’t remember the book, or where it occurs in the book? Or which Roman Emperor—Elgabalus…