Elasticsearch and Solr devs take note: our book, Relevant Search is out. This book captures not just my experience, not just John Berryman’s experience but OpenSource Connection’s years of experience using Solr and Elasticesarch to build smarter search applications.

To quote the book’s description

Users expect search to be simple: They enter a few terms and expect perfectly-organized, relevant results instantly. But behind this simple user experience, complex machinery is at work. Relevant Search demystifies relevance work. Using Elasticsearch, it teaches you how to return engaging search results to your users, helping you understand and leverage the internals of Lucene-based search engines. Relevant Search walks through real-world problems using a cohesive philosophy that combines text analysis, query building, and score shaping to express business ranking rules to the search engine. It outlines how to guide the engineering process by monitoring search user behavior and shifting the enterprise to a search-first culture focused on humans, not computers. You’ll see how the search engine provides a deeply pluggable platform for integrating search ranking with machine learning, ontologies, personalization, domain-specific expertise, and other enriching sources

We hope you find the book useful in your work. Manning’s author online forum is available for any feedback about the text.

Also feel free to get in touch with us directly about the book or our firms consulting around search, relevance, and recommendations.