It’s February in Boston, and that means its the perfect weather to stay inside, grab a drink and some food and talk about Search.  We at KMW Technology were very excited to host the Boston Elasticsearch meetup group in our Cambridge office this past month.  We had a great turnout and it was really nice to meet some of the local search practitioners and geek out on tools and techniques associated with Elastic.

Our very own Rudi Seitz was the main speaker of the night giving an in depth talk about how relevancy works in a Search Engine.  He covered the foundations of relevancy algorithms, how scoring is computed, query structure and analyzers, different common approaches to changing relevancy and how to tune it.  In addition to being a Search expert and super smart software engineer, Rudi is also artistically creative and authored several relevancy inspired limericks to help illustrate the concepts in his talk.  Check out the slides below for the full presentation.

The second speaker of the night was Elasticsearch’s own Josh Leger providing an overview of the new App Search offering in Elastic .  This Elastic product is a traditional Enterprise or Site search component for Elastic but with some nice abstraction for simplifying things like tuning relevancy.  The talk was a nice counterpoint to Rudi’s, showcasing an easy to use admin console to tune relevancy, simplifying a lot of the complex detail Rudi covered.  The talk also served as a reminder of the impressive amount of innovation and productization coming out of the team at Elasticsearch.

We’d like to give a special shout out to Andrew, Josh, Faith and the whole Boston team at Elasticsearch for sponsoring this event.  We look forward to the next one!