The Context The scenario description is quite simple: we want to use synonyms and stopwords. Following the path of our previous article, we will introduce an additional component in the analysis chain: a StopFilter, which, as the name suggests, removes a set of words from an incoming token stream. We will use the following data…
This flash blog post will address a very specific and common problem : how to manage entities/concepts composed by multiple terms in a vanilla Apache Solr/Elasticsearch instance ( no plugins or extensions to install). The (deployment) context An Elasticsearch or Apache Solr infrastructure where you cannot install third-party components (e.g. plugins, filters, query parsers). This can…
A Software Engineer is always required to give his customers a concrete evidence about deliverables quality. A Search Engineer deals with a specialisation of such generic Software Quality, which is called Search Quality. What is Search Quality? And why is it so important in a search infrastructure? After all, the “Software Quality” should be omni-comprensive,…
The Apache Lucene/Solr suggesters are important to Sease : we explored the topic in the past[1] and we strongly believe the autocomplete feature to be vital for a lot of search applications. This blog post explores in details the current status of the Lucene BlendedInfixSuggester, some bugs of the most recent version ( with the…
At the time we speak ( Solr 7.3.1 ) SolrCloud is a reliable and stable distributed architecture for Apache Solr. But it is not perfect and failures happen. Apache Zookeeper[1] is the system responsible of managing the communications across the SolrCloud cluster. It contains the shared collections configurations and it has the view of the…
Scenario You’re working as a search engineer for XYZ Ltd, a company which sells electric components. XYZ provided you the application logs of the last six months, and some business requirements. Two kinds of customers, two kinds of requirements, two kinds of search The log analysis shows that XYZ has mainly two kinds of customers:…
At the time we speak ( Solr 7.3.0 ) SolrCloud is a reliable and stable distributed architecture for Apache Solr. But it is not perfect and failures happen. This lightening blog post will present some practical tips to follow when a specific shard of a collection is down with no leader and the situation is…
Quantity detection? What is a quantity? And why do we need to detect it? A quantity, as described by Martin Fowler in his “Analysis Patterns” [1] is defined as a pair which combines an amount and unit (such as 30 litres, 0.25 cl, or 140 cm). In search-based applications, there are many cases where you may…
This blog is a quick summary of my (subjective) experience at ECIR 2018 : the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval, hosted in Grenoble (France) from 26/03/2018 to 29/03/2018. Deep Learning and Explicability Eight long papers accepted were about Deep Learning. The topics “Neural Network” and “Word Embedding” were the most occurring in the accepted…
What are “Invisible Queries”? This is an extract of an article [1] on Lucidworks.com, by Grant Ingersoll, talking about invisible queries: “It is often necessary in many applications to execute more than one query for any given user query. For instance, in applications that require very high precision (only good results, forgoing marginal results), the…