Yes, a new study of lost productivity is out. No, it’s not about the number of people who spend time on Facebook or Woot.com at work. Thomson Reuters quantifies the problem as $1.5 trillion in lost productivity, with some interesting numbers around how many professionals are getting 50+ emails per day (I think the answer is “everyone I know”.)  Cleverly enough, I’ve seen more than one legacy commercial search technology company come…

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After so many of you attended the recent webcast we sponsored on “Findability: Designing the Search Experience” with Tyler Tate of Twigkit, there was a long list of questions that didn’t get addressed during the course of the presentation. As there was a pretty good list of them, we thought you might find it useful to get some more insight. So we’ve invited Tyler to put together some answers to your inquiries.

Q:

…

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Announcing the inaugural meeting of the RTP Apache Solr/Lucene Meetup, sponsored by Lucid Imagination and Lulu Press.

Presentations and discussion of innovations and applications with Lucene & Solr, the Apache Open Source Search Engine/Platform for the Research Triangle Park Area of Raleigh, Durham and neighboring environs of North Carolina. Mark your calendars for September 21, 2010. Agenda:

6:00 – 6:30 Meet and Greet
7:00 – 7:15 Discussion about Lulu
…

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Introduction

Recently, I did some minor work on improving the usability of the Lucene spell checker (see LUCENE-2479, LUCENE-2608 and the associated Solr work) and it got me thinking that a post on spell checking in Solr would be useful.

For those who aren’t familiar, the notion of spell checking in search (often called Did You Mean?) is slightly different from the notion of simply correcting spelling errors.  It’s not that we don’t…

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September 8, 2010
09:00 PDT, 12:00 EDT, 16:00 GMT
Hosted by Bitpipe.com and sponsored by Lucid Imagination

Click here to sign up

In order to deliver a compelling, customized search experience, a broad span of leading organizations are turning to search solutions that include full-text search capabilities.

In this webcast, author and database/XML expert Nicholas Chase contrasts the conventional SQL-driven programming approach with the simpler, more streamlined approaches available…

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In the few short years since Yonik Seeley stood Apache Solr up on its feet, there’s been an accelerating realization that the Apache Lucene is going farther faster because of Solr — the Lucene Search Server.

Now, it’s official: InfoWorld has put Solr up as one of the Top Ten open source applications, awarding it a BOSSIE award for the Best of Open Source Software…

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Lately, Brazil has been getting a lot of attention (host to the next World Cup in 2014 and site of the first Olympics to be held in South America in 2016), but it also has gotten attention for its embrace of open source technologies. It was my pleasure to speak at an event organized for business executives by our partner in Brazil, Primeware. The topic?—Open source enterprise search software, of course.

I talk about my…

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Check out today’s interview of Satish Gannu, director of engineering at Cisco responsible for their Pulse platform, a social technology-driven expert system. Using Lucene/Solr at the core of their offering, Cisco changes the equation on the classic knowledge-management platform by speeding knowledge value — cutting the time it takes to find people in the organization who know what they’re talking about.

Why are you interested in Lucene/Solr?
We talked to multiple companies, and we

…

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Do you remember this scenario from days of yore?

• Company A buys a software license from Company B, a startup.
• Company A crosses its fingers that Company B doesn’t go bankrupt and disappear, along with the source code for Company A’s mission-critical software.
• Company B goes kaput.
• Company A is left with some machine-readable binary code that it is powerless to develop or use.

Source code escrow has changed the outcome of this…

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Findability: Designing the Search Experience

See the video & download the slides

Consumer search engines have set user expectations at a simple box – and billions are being invested to deliver findability to satisfy a world of consumers.

But you don’t need billions of dollars or millions of users to build a user-friendly search application. In fact, studies of how and why people search have revealed a set of principles that — if followed —…

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