Breakfast Links 19.01.2009

* Search & Deploy

Interesting article regarding semantic search being the basis of lots of scifi applications used in star trek etc – also worth reading for non IT insider. Doesn’t the Google Android reminds you on the good ol’ Star Trek Tricoder (picture above!)?

* Open Source Search & Search Appliances Need Expert Attention

Article on enterprise search concerning the need of a search expert or even better, a specialized search company. I totally share the opinion of Lynda Moulton “I am going to put my confidence in the industry to spawn a whole new category of search service organizations“.

* Open Source NLP and Search Engine Libraries Updated

A useful collection of open source search and text processing tools!

Breakfast Links 14.01.2009

* Information Builders (Schweiz) AG übernimmt spezialisiertes Search–Team von fast, A Microsoft Subsidiary

Information Builders (ch) just acquired a 2 person team from FAST to build its new search excellence team. Their current product iWay Enterprise Index is an Enterprise Search solution and being built upon GSA and Lucene. Does anyone has any details about this combination of GSA and Lucene?

* HDFS Reliability

Tom White from Cloudera (company from US with a business model around Apache Hadoop) released a paper about the reliability of HDFS with some useful recommendations on the productive use of it.

Breakfast Links 13.01.2009

* IA Konferenz 2009

I never went to this conference before and pretty happy about the location (100km from my home office) in Hamburg this year. Call for papers is not done yet but there were also interesting topics at the IA 2007 you can find here.

* Virtualization and Search: Performance Tests Summary

The answer of what I’ve ever asked myself and never tried out. The article also brought me to the public Enron email data set, wow, never heard about it so far!

Breakfast Links 12.01.2009

* PyLucene – Python Lucene – Joins Apache Lucene

PyLucene is a python based port of Lucene which is build automatically from the original Lucene source. It just joined Apache Lucene as a sub project. Does this means I can run Lucene in Google’s App Engine?

* Interview with Norbert Weitkämper

Norbert Weitkämper (Weitkämper Technology) interviewed in december 2008 by Stephen E. Arnold from Beyond Search. After the previous interview with Hans-Christian Brockmann, Beyond Search means also a lot of beyond Kentucky!

Breakfast Links 08.01.2009

* TrustYou – make a good choice

I just stumbled upon a press release from TrustYou, a search engine for hotel and restaurant recommendations. TrustYou calls itself a semantic meta search engine. Meta because it makes use of various existing hotel recommendation platforms like HRS, hotel.de and more. Semantic because of its pre-processing methods for heterogeneous text data about hotels/restaurant and user comments. Yeah, finally a new alternaitve search engine from germany, chapeau!

See also this post: TrustYou durchsucht Hotel-Bewertungen (german)

* Google Semantics Surfacing

Stephen Arnold’s response to the article “Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?” from readwriteweb.com.

Breakfast Links 06.01.2009

* Channel Intelligence Case Study: Amazon Web Services

Interesting case study about how Channel Intelligence uses a semi-automatic way to categorize masses of images and product data. CI uses Amazaon’s Mechanical Turk – an online marketplace for human workforce – to support their automated categorization system.

* Sky Grid: Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Challenger

A quick capture of Sky Grid (US company) from Beyond Search, especially regarding its Business Model and opportunities. This is actually a kind of software I built a couple years ago for different companies (10.000+) over here in germany!

* Nutch 1.0 in 1-2 weeks?

Just read a message from Dennis Kubes on the Nutch Mailing-List regarding the release of Nutch 1.0! The Jira link is also pretty interesting about the upcoming features…

Breakfast Links 09.12.2008

* Yahoo BOSS Now Serving 100 Queries Per Second

While Yahoo! was recently struggling with lots of negative issues in terms of their business (who is next Yahoo! CEO?), they kept on publishing and propagating their technologies. According to the Yahoo Search Blog, BOSS is now serving 10 million queries per day! In my opinion Yahoo’s search technology is catching up fast and is far ahead of Google’s APIs.

* If you were ever interested in an UIMA Lucene Cas Consumer, check this out:

at the JULIE Lab, we’ve been working (silently) on a new (and completely
altered) version of our Lucene CAS Indexer consumer (Lucas). We are
planning to make this available soon — preferably in the UIMA sandbox.
In fact, LUCAS now is able to perform offset-based token stream
alignment and merging of UIMA annotations (via position increment) in
the same Lucene field (e.g. “documenttext” or “title”), which we feel is
more appropriate for text indexing — instead of putting each UIMA
annotation into a separate field like the Solr approach (still possible
with the new LUCAS).

(UIMA mailing list, Joachim Wermter)

Breakfast Links 08.12.2008

* Arnold White Study Published

Galatea published the study “Successful Enterprise Search Management” by Stephen E. Arnold (Beyond Search) and Martin White (Interview at ArnoldIT). The study is essentially about how to manage an enterprise search environnement, beginning from the selection and integration of a vendor and how a project team is setup. There are also some chapters about search and technology in general like content processing (text mining). I don’t know yet wether it makes sense to get the study for businesses in germany but will write a report on it!

* Tika and Solr

Grant Ingersoll just committed an ExtractingRequestHandler module for Solr which adds Tika support to solr. Meaning, it is now possible to feed Solr with a variety of common document formats like Office, PDF, HTML and more. Awesome!

Breakfast Links 01.12.2008

* Start of german Lucene Online Series

JAXenter just started a new article series on Apache Lucene by Bernd Fondermann. The first article roughly describes Lucene and it’s API with and indexing and search example. Nothing new, but in german. Later articles will cover Solr, Nutch and Tika (yeeehaa)!

* Concept Searching

Stephen Arnold on Concept Searching Inc. which delivers software products around taxonomy creation and automatic classification. Again, this company also offers its services and products around Microsoft Sharepoint!

Breakfast Links 28.11.2008

* You are a knowledge worker. Become a knowledge hero.

I just discovered the belgium company Whatever which launched a software in the field of knowledge management called Knowledge Plaza. Knowledge Plaza is focused on Enterprise Social Search methods which are roughly described here by a Whatever employee. Under the hood, Knowledge Plaza uses Apache Lucene core for Search (?) and Aperture for text extraction.

* Hadoop Map-Reduce – Tuning and Debugging

Just stumbled upon this overview for tuning and debugging Hadoop.