After a wonderful time last year, I was able to present yet again this year’s Lucene Revolution conference in Boston. Lucene Revolution is a yearly conference put on by Lucid Imagination, a company focused upon supporting and commercializing the open source Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies (and integrating them with related technologies). My talk was entitled “Building a Real-time, Solr-powered Recommendation engine.”
Video:
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/treygrainger/building-a-real-time-solrpowered-recommendation-engine
Talk Summary: Searching text is what Solr is known for, but did you know that many companies receive an equal or greater business impact through implementing a recommendation engine in addition to their text search capabilities? With a few tweaks, Solr (or Lucene) can also serve as a full featured recommendation engine. Machine learning libraries like Apache Mahout provide excellent behavior-based, off-line recommendation algorithms, but what if you want more control? This talk will demonstrate how to effectively utilize Solr to perform collaborative filtering (users who liked this also liked…), categorical classification and subsequent hierarchical-based recommendations, as well as related-concept extraction and concept based recommendations. Sound difficult? It’s not. Come learn step-by-step how to create a powerful real-time recommendation engine using Apache Solr and see some real-world examples of some of these strategies in action.
