Information retrieval
Apache Solr
A search server on Apache Lucene: schema, request handlers, and the operation of a cluster. It is the engine I have spent the most years with.
Broader subject: Search engines
Work
- Public search at country scale — Search a citizen can use: a polling place, a beneficiary record, found in hundreds of millions of rows.
- Concept search before vectors were the default — A books-and-journals search that let people explore by concepts, built in 2018 from phrases and similarity, not from a vector database.
- One catalog, many storefronts — Product search, autosuggest, filters, and per-field similarity for an omnichannel retailer: web, marketplace, and stores.
- A move that kept the answers — A production move from self-managed Apache Solr to managed OpenSearch, checked by whether the top results still agreed.
- The team's output — Leading a search engineering group while staying close enough to the system to tell a relevance question from an operations question.