I’ve been involved in running search-themed events for many years – from helping with Enterprise Search Europe (2011-2016), Haystack in the US, London and Berlin (2018-2024) and in between many smaller events such as Search Hackdays and Search Meetups. The latter remain my favourite kind of event – small, friendly, local and a great place to build a community of search professionals and enthusiasts. Over the years I’ve run the Cambridge Enterprise Search Meetup (highlights included a visit by father-of-BM25 Stephen Robertson and the regular blues jam in the pub downstairs afterwards), assisted with the Enterprise Search London Meetup and most successfully ran the Lucene/Solr London Meetup. Some of these events would regularly attract over a hundred people to venues including Bloomberg’s amazing lecture theatre (where we had actual waiters serving snacks!) and Barclay’s Canary Wharf building with an amazing view over the Thames.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on in-person events – even now I feel attendance has never really recovered – and so far I’ve not restarted a UK Search Meetup, although I’ve attended a few such as Elastic London and the London Information Retrieval Meetup run by the Sease team. I’ve also failed to find many that cover that particular intersection of AI and search we’re living through – where search folks are adding AI, and AI folks are rediscovering search and information retrieval. I want to bring these two groups together to learn from each other and make connections.
A team effort
It’s thus been really exciting to find some others keen to explore this space, in particular the OpenSearch team and Eliatra (who support OpenSearch with hosting and services). Although a London OpenSearch Meetup group has existed for a short while, together we decided to widen the focus of this group to cover not just OpenSearch, but other search engines, and also AI subjects (that have some relation to search, of course). We hope by doing this to attract a wider audience, allow some cross-fertilisation between topics of interest to us all, introduce new (and perhaps old) technologies, tips & tricks and find out what we really mean by AI-powered Search. Thus we’re very happy to invite you to join the London Search & AI User Group!
At our events we’ll have:
- Two amazing talks on search & AI subjects
- A chance for Q&A on both the talks and on more general subjects – need help with your search project? Want to find out what’s coming next? Ask away!
- Drinks and snacks (usually pizza)
- Networking – find a friend, meet people facing similar challenges, even find career opportunities or potential collaborators
- Swag (from some of our hosts and speakers)
- For those who would like to, a chance to meet in a pub nearby afterwards.
- If possible we’ll stream the event for those who can’t make it in person, and we’ll also try to record the talks (this will depend on the venue).
How you can help
We’re going to aim to run an event every two or three months – but to make this happen, we need your help in two ways:
- We need hosts – somewhere to hold a Meetup, for at least 50-60 people, in central London, on an evening in the week between 630pm-9pm (ish). We’ll need a screen or projector to borrow for our talks. Hosts are welcome to suggest a talk or at least give a short introduction themselves (it’s a great place to recruit!). If you can provide some snacks/pizza and drinks that would also be great – but if not, we may be able to find someone to sponsor these separately. You’ll be able to put your logo and link on the Meetup group of course.
- We need talks – on any aspect of search or search & AI – on indexing, data conditioning, relevance, operations, interesting projects, amazing applications, scaling, different search engines (open source or commercial), RAG, vector search, search with or without LLMS, old school tricks and cutting edge ideas. Just don’t make it a sales pitch!
(If you’ve never given a talk before, a Meetup is a great place to start – and I’m happy to give advice and help to new presenters, just ask).
If you can help with either speaking or hosting please let us know using this form (I’ll also be asking for help at our first event).
Our first Search Meetup – April 3rd 2025
The first meeting of our new group will be at 112/114 Middlesex Street, near Liverpool Street Station, from 6.30pm-9pm on April 3rd 2025, kindly hosted by EPAM. Speakers will be myself – showing you how to test search on any website, and Nate Boot of OpenSearch. We’ll have Q&A too, so get those questions ready. Space may be limited so register soon!
I’m hoping to see some old friends and meet many new ones – see you there!
If you need help planning, hosting or running a search-related event – or a speaker, let me know.