June Meetup - Search Relevancy & Hacking Lucene for Custom Search Results

PLEASE NOTE since SkillsMatter are hosting, they have also created an event (https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/7191-search-relevancy) you will need to register (https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/7191-search-relevancy) for!

Our talks are from Doug Turnbull (https://twitter.com/softwaredoug), author of Relevant Search (http://manning.com/turnbull); Search Consultant at OpenSource Connections (http://opensourceconnections.com):

Search Relevancy: "Getting good search results is hard; maintaining good relevancy is even harder. Fixing one problem can easily create many others. Without good tools to measure the impact of relevancy changes, there’s no way to know if the “fix” that you’ve developed will cause relevancy problems with other queries. Ideally, much like we have unit tests for code to detect when bugs are introduced, we would like to create ways to measure changes in relevancy.

This is exactly what was done at OSC. They have developed a series of tools and practices that allow them to work with content experts to define metrics for search quality. Once defined, they can instantly measure the impact of modifying their relevancy strategy, allowing them to iterate quickly on very difficult relevancy problems. "

Hacking Lucene for Custom Search Results: "Search is everywhere, and therefore so is Apache Lucene. While providing amazing out-of-the-box defaults, there's enough projects weird enough to require custom search scoring and ranking. In this talk, I'll walk through how to use Lucene to implement your custom scoring and search ranking. We'll see how you can achieve both amazing power (and responsibility) over your search results. We'll see the flexibility of Lucene's data structures and explore the pros/cons of custom Lucene scoring vs other methods of improving search relevancy."

By the way Doug will be giving out an excellent discount code for his book (http://www.manning.com/turnbull/)....