Solr does GEO search

1 CommentOpen Source, Search technology, Solr, Technology, , , , ,

gisApache Solr is a very capable enterprise search platform, doing most things you would expect from such a solution. But what about GEO sensitive applications like Yellow-pages, maps search, sort by distance to X etc? The big commercial systems such as FAST, Autonomy and Endecca, have it but Apache Lucene/Solr does not seem to support GEO search, or what?

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Test driving Chrome OS

1 CommentIn the news, Open Source, Technology, The Cloud, Trends, , ,

chrome_logo_may09After all the buzz about Chrome OS being open-sourced as “Chromium OS”, I had to give it a ride.

I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks.

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Google competes with iTunes

In the news, Search technology, Technology, Trends, , , , , , , , , , ,

Picture 2Google has just integrated music search, called “Google Discover Music“, into its search results – in US only so far. Partnering up with imeem, lala, myspace (iLike), Pandora, Rhapsody as well as the major music record labels, Google is striving to help users find and listen to music in just a few clicks. As much as 2 out of the top-10 searches are music related, which really suggests that many people are looking for music at Google.

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Google introduces similar images search

Technology

Google “similar images” search is now out of beta (Cnet article), and it looks very promising at first try. The problem with the traditional image search is that it relies on keywords to be found either in image filename or in the text surrounding the image on the web page. With the new feature, a

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Solr being used by Google’s allforgood.org

1 CommentOpen Source, Search technology, Solr, Technology, , , , , ,

Google runs a web page called AllForGood which helps people find opportunities to volunteer in various organizations in their neighbourhood. In the beginning, the search in the site was updated from Google’s crawlers crawling several volunteer webpages. However, when designing a tighter integrated, more real-time search, they turned to Apache Solr. On their blog they

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