Towards an open source tool stack for e-commerce search
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2020-10-17

Towards an open source tool stack for e-commerce search
Eric Pugh, René Kriegler

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020
https://apachecon.com/acah2020/

Search teams in the e-commerce space want to own their search: they want to understand how exactly the retrieval works and optimise it according to their specific needs, both from the user and from the seller perspective. Implementing search using open source search engines, such as Solr and Elasticsearch, seems like a perfect match. Unfortunately, the open source solutions available today aren’t anywhere near reaching parity with a commercial solution out of the box, especially when it comes to optimizing search relevance and managing individual queries as a merchandiser. This leads to a very difficult buy vs build decision, especially for smaller teams that don’t have deep search expertise already and are faced with developing significant functionality for digital commerce from scratch. In this session we will introduce Chorus: an initiative to combine open source tools and libraries like Querqy (powerful query rewriting library), SMUI (a search management UI to boost and bury products and categories), and the Quepid, RRE, and Quaerite (search relevance assessment and tuning projects) into a single template to accelerate the development of your own e-commerce search, allowing you to shift from setting up basic search functionality to domain specific optimizations much faster.

Eric Pugh:
Fascinated by the craft of software development, Eric Pugh has been involved in the open source world as a developer, committer and user for the past fifteen years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and continues to be very active in the Solr and Tika projects, as well as avidly reads every commit to the Zeppelin project! In biotech, financial services, and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for extracting text from binary files (such as PDF and MS Office formats), that subsequently became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! He co-authored the book Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, now on its third edition. Today he helps OSC’s clients build their own search teams and improve their search maturity, both by leading projects and by acting as a trusted advisor.

René Kriegler:
René has been working as a freelance search consultant for clients in Germany and abroad for more than ten years. Although he is interested in all aspects of search and NLP, key areas include search relevance and e-commerce search. His technological focus is on Solr/Elasticsearch/Lucene. René is founder and co-organiser of MICES (Mix-Camp E-Commerce Search - a Berlin Buzzwords partner event). He maintains Querqy - an open source library for query pre-processing.