Test Driven 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 OpenSource Connections. 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.

During the session, “Test Driven Relevancy — How to Work with Content Experts to Optimize and Maintain Search Relevancy,” Doug Turnbull and 
Rena Morse will give you an in depth look at the tools they utilize when they not only need to solve a relevancy problem, they need to make sure it stays solved over the product’s life.

This intermediate level session will take place from 10:15-11:00 on Wednesday, November 6. Click here for more details.

About the Speakers:

Doug Turnbull (@softwaredoug), Search and Big Data Architect at OpenSource Connections, has been engrossed in programming since his parents first bought him an Apple IIe computer in 4th grade. In his current position as a search consultant, Doug creates custom client search applications, focused heavily on Solr relevancy and performance. Doug’s skills bridge the gap between content managers and hard-core tech, allowing him to skillfully deliver solutions through code, talk, and writing. Doug continues to enjoy the craft of software development, and the joy of carefully applying technology to solving a problem.

Rena Morse is Director of Semantics at Silverchair Information Systems, where she is responsible for semantic product management for the SCM6 publishing platform. During her tenure at Silverchair, she has co-architected the automated semantic tagging system underpinning SCM6 and managed projects to develop and implement semantic-based search and metadata services for STEM clients.

More Details:

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Lucene/Solr Revolution is presented by Lucidworks, the commercial entity for Apache Lucene/Solr open source search — the future of search technology.