{"id":72,"date":"2012-01-22T17:21:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/wordpress\/?p=72"},"modified":"2012-01-22T17:21:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:21:47","slug":"conference-review-search-solutions-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"Conference Review: Search Solutions 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In November I attended the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group\u2019s annual Search Solutions conference<\/a>, which brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the latest advances\u00a0in search. This is always a fascinating event, split into several sessions to cover the various aspects of search: web, enterprise and more.<\/p>\n

The day started with a talk by John Tait<\/a> on the challenges of patent search where different units are concerned \u2013 where for example a search for a plastic with a melting point of 200\u00b0C wouldn\u2019t find a patent that uses \u00b0F or Kelvin. John presented a solution from max.recall<\/a>, a plugin for Apache Solr<\/a> that promises to solve this issue. We then heard from Lewis Crawford of the UK Web Archive<\/a> on their very large index of 240m archived webpages \u2013 some great features were shown including a postcode-based browser. The system is based on Apache Solr and they are also using \u2018big data\u2019 projects such as Apache Hadoop<\/a> \u2013 which by the sound of it they\u2019re going to need as they\u2019re expecting to be indexing a lot more websites in the future, up to 4 or 5 million. The third talk in this segment came from Toby Mostyn of Polecat<\/a> on their MeaningMine social media monitoring system, again built on Solr (a theme was beginning to emerge!). MeaningMine implements an iterative query method, using a form of relevance feedback<\/a> to help users contribute more useful query information.<\/p>\n

Before lunch we heard from Ricardo Baeza-Yates<\/a> of Yahoo! on moving beyond the \u2018ten blue links\u2019 model of web search, with some fascinating ideas around how we should consider a Web of objects<\/em> rather than web pages. Gabriella Kazai <\/a>of Microsoft Research followed, talking about how best to gather high-quality relevance judgements for testing search algorithms, using crowdsourcing systems such as Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk<\/a>. Some good insights here as to how a high-quality task description can attract high-quality workers.<\/p>\n

After lunch we heard from Marianne Sweeney<\/a> with a refreshingly candid treatment of how best to tune enterprise search products that very rarely live up to expectations \u2013 I liked one of her main points that \u201cthe product is never what was used in the demo\u201d. Matt Taylor from Funnelback<\/a> followed with a brief overview of his company\u2019s technology and some case studies.<\/p>\n

The last section of the day featured Iain Fletcher of Search Technologies on the value of metadata and on their interesting new pipeline framework, Aspire<\/a>. (As an aside, Iain has also joined the Pipelines meetup group<\/a> I set up recently). Next up was Jared McGinnis of the Press Association<\/a> on their work on Semantic News \u2013 it was good to see an openly available news ontology<\/a> as a result. Ian Kegel<\/a> of British Telecom came next with a talk about TV program recommendation systems, and we finished with Kristian Norling<\/a>\u2019s talk on a healthcare information system that he worked on before joining Findwise<\/a>. We ended with a brief Fishbowl discussion which asked amongst other things what the main themes of the day had been \u2013 my own contribution being \u201ceveryone\u2019s using Solr!\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare to find quite so many search experts in one room, and the quality of discussions outside the talks was as high as the quality of the talks themselves \u2013 congratulations are due to the organisers for putting together such an interesting programme.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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John Tait opening the fishbowl session at Search Solutions 2011<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In November I attended the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group\u2019s annual Search Solutions conference, which brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the latest advances\u00a0in search. This is always a fascinating event, split into several sessions to cover the various aspects of search: web, enterprise and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195,230],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference-review","category-winter-2012","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}