June Meetup: Search Quality Evaluation & Selecting Open Source For Corporate Use

Two great talks this month:

1. Search quality evaluation: a developer perspective - from Andrea Gazzarini of www.Sease.io

"Search quality evaluation is an evergreen topic every search engineer struggles with. Improving the correctness and effectiveness of a search system requires a set of tools which help measuring the direction where the system is going. The talk will focus on how a search quality evaluation tool can be seen under a practical developer perspective, how it could be used for producing a deliverable artifact and how it could be integrated within a continuous integration infrastructure."

Andrea Gazzarini is a curious software engineer, mainly focused on the Java language and passionate about search technologies. With more than 15 years of experience in various software engineering areas, his adventure with the search domain began in 2010, when he met Apache Solr. Since then, he has been involved in many projects, across different fields. He's an open-source lover; he's currently involved in several (too many!) projects, always thinking about a "big" idea that will change his (developer) life.

2. A corporate perspective on selecting open source for enterprise search from
   Martin White of www.intranetfocus.com

When a corporate IT department starts to look for an enterprise search solution they have many options - commercial, SharePoint, appliance, cloud and open source (in various flavours). No matter how good the technology probably the fundamental challenge is getting it through the procurement process! In 2017 I worked on two global search projects where open source was an option. One chose open source and one went commercial. In this presentation I will look at selection, evaluation, contract and implementation issues as they affect the adoption of open source solutions in the enterprise search market.

Martin White has been advising organisations on their intranet/enterprise search strategy since 1998. He is the author of Enterprise Search (O'Reilly Media, 2015) and a member of The Search Network, which released Search Insights 2018 earlier this year (http://www.flax.co.uk/community/publications/ for a free download).