I’m an expert search consultant. My journey in search began in 1999 when I joined Muscat Ltd., co-founded by Martin Porter (author of the famous stemming algorithm) and helped lead a team that built a half-billion-page web search engine in 18 months. Leaving in 2001, I formed with some colleagues a consulting company, Flax, which I ran for the next 17 years before merging with our US partner OpenSource Connections. During this time we worked for clients including the UK government, leading recruitment companies, law firms and e-commerce companies, focusing on solutions based on Apache Solr and Elasticsearch, and I ran all non-technical aspects of the business including sales, recruiting, marketing, accounts and project management. I helped run and spoke at many leading industry events across the world. Flax then merged with our US partner, OpenSource Connections (OSC).
As part of the OSC leadership team, I helped navigate the business through challenging times between 2019-2024. I ran search projects for clients across the world in multiple business sectors, some of them with revenues in the billions, acting as a senior Managing Consultant within small expert teams of relevance engineers. As Sales & Marketing Director I created, marketed and sold consulting and training engagements, often carrying the project from initial enquiry all the way through to successful delivery. Case studies on some of these projects are available. I created efficient and fully documented processes for sales and marketing, designed & developed collateral, maintained the company website, wrote many blogs and appeared on several industry podcasts and panels. I helped plan and manage a shift to mostly online engagements and the growth of the company beyond its original base of Charlottesville, USA to a mostly remote workforce distributed across the USA and Europe. In recent years I have also helped clients take advantage of recent innovations in AI-powered search, as AI has revolutionised our sector.
After attending OSC’s first Haystack conference in 2018, I took the idea to London to host the first Haystack Europe event and subsequently ran two of these conferences every year until 2024, handling promotion, ticket sales, scheduling, recording & editing videos and hosting the events in person – one attendee wrote ‘a spectacularly well run conference – Haystack is my favorite’. The most recent Haystack events were sold out and attracted nearly 250 attendees from across the world. I have also organised many smaller Meetup events including the London Lucene/Solr Meetup, Cambridge Enterprise Search Meetup and the online Haystack LIVE! Meetup which has over 1400 members. During my time at OSC the pandemic caused a sudden shift to online attendance and I worked with other event organisers to create highly-regarded online events, eventually transitioning these to hybrid events in the following years.
I am regularly asked to speak and host panels at industry events such as MICES, Berlin Buzzwords, Algolia’s DevCon and Search Solutions run by the British Computer Society, where in 2023 I was awarded Best Presentation.
Embodying OSC’s mission statement to ‘Empower Search Teams’ I focused on building our brand and making OSC a leading and influential voice in the area of search relevance – developing educational materials such as a 200+ item video archive, glossaries, collections of useful tools, lists of worldwide Search Meetups, and administering the free Relevance Slack, which has now grown to a 5500+ person strong community covering every aspect of search. I forged links with many other companies in the sector, helping develop a shared understanding of search relevance principles such as the importance of measurement, leading to a recent role promoting User Behaviour Insights, a joint project between OSC and AWS OpenSearch which will change how all search engineers understand and utilise user behaviour data for improving result quality – my rich personal network has allowed me to introduce this concept to many search engine vendors and several are now working on adopting it.
While at OSC I was also asked to join OpenUK, a relatively new organisation promoting open standards, open data and open source, particularly for government and regulators, and became an Ambassador for the organisation and a judge of the annual OpenUK Awards. I spoke at OpenUK’s State of Open Con in London in 2024 on ‘How to Build Open Source AI’.
I co-authored the book ‘Searching the Enterprise’ for NOW Publications (get the free PDF by clicking on the image on the right) and as part of The Search Network, an international group of search experts, contributed to several annual ‘Search Insights’ reports. I am often featured on industry podcasts and interviewed by those writing about search & AI.
I love talking about, teaching and implementing great search & AI! But why call myself The Search Juggler? Well, I’ve also been a circus skills performer and teacher for over 30 years, and I’ve occasionally used these skills in my working life. There’s a lot to keep in the air when you’re building great search & AI – business requirements, people, data – and many requirements to juggle!