OpenSource Connections

Search consulting firm and tooling company. Authors of many foundational search relevance articles and widely-used open source search tooling.

Products

• Quepid — web-based search relevance evaluation platform; run NDCG/P@K queries against a live search engine, manage judgment lists, track quality over time
• Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin — the o19s elasticsearch-learning-to-rank plugin (2017); see Elasticsearch Learning to Rank
• OSC also drove OpenSearch’s native Search Relevance Workbench

Note

The CI/CD-oriented Rated Ranking Evaluator (RRE) is a separate tool from Sease, not an OSC product.

Key People

• Doug Turnbull — co-founder (has since left; now independent), author of “Relevant Search” (O’Reilly), prolific blogger at softwaredoug.com
• Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade — principal, search relevance consultant

Articles

Multiple foundational articles from OSC team:

• What is a Relevant Search Result · Choosing Your Search Relevance Evaluation Metric · Implementing NDCG Scorer in Quepid · Bayesian BM25 is Cool · Succeeding with Relevance Evaluation using PPS Sampling
• We’re Bringing Learning to Rank to Elasticsearch — the o19s elasticsearch-learning-to-rank plugin (2017)

Community

• Relevance Slack — OSC created and runs the field’s central Slack community (Solr, Elasticsearch, Learning to Rank, vector search, product management, and #jobs / #jobs-eu channels — the field’s de-facto job board). Join: https://opensourceconnections.com/slack. See How to Start a Career in Search for how to use it.

Talks & Videos

• Rene Kriegler - Query Relaxation — talk by Rene Kriegler (introduced by Charlie Hull)
• The Search Engine Migration Circus — Max Irwin

Related Concepts

• Search Evaluation · Judgment Lists · NDCG · Learning to Rank · Elasticsearch Learning to Rank