SNAP! Stretching the Elastic Computing Cloud

Trexy successfully migrated to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) a few months ago.

Last month I migrated the much larger Turbo10 cluster (our sister search engine) into the Cloud. Turbo10's advertising network currently receives over 30 million search hits per day and close to 1 billion searches per month, so its capacity requirements are much higher than Trexy.

We launched over 20 machines in the Cloud to service Turbo10's incoming load and were alarmed when many of the machines turned red. The load was way too high. "Quick! Launch more machines!!"

Then suddenly we received this message from Amazon, "Sorry - machine quota exceeded." SNAP!! It seems we'd stretched the 'elastic' in elastic computing too far. What followed was an anxious wait until someone from Amazon manually increased our quota.

Things are now running fine and both search engines are now happily situated in the Cloud. Phew!

Now I'd better get back to designing the next version of Trexy ...

More Search Solutions

Nige has been invited back to speak at the Search Solutions 2008 conference for a third time.

This annual event is organised by the British Computer Society's Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) and will be held in London on Tuesday, 24th of September.

Network at the Pub

We had another enjoyable Flag and Bell networking event on Tuesday night. The rain held off as our pub crawl took us from the Anchor Pub down cobbled side streets to Brew Wharf near London Bridge. Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first pub.

Congratulations to the JMMK team for winning this month's quiz. Thanks to Wordtracker.com, Userplane.com and for this month's prizes.
The Flag and Bell also made it in to TNT Magazine on Monday. Check out the article, Network at the pub, on page 96.

A FAB Firefox 3 Party

We had a great turnout last night for our Firefox 3 party. Glad we had the summer sun for this one too.

Congratulations to all the quiz winners last night. If someone comes up with a solution for how a multi-player scissor, rock, paper play-off could work, let us know.


Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first pub. Details of the next Flag and Bell event in August coming soon.

A FAB Time in the Rain

It wouldn't be a British Summer Party if it didn't rain.

I was glad so many people braved the weather to attend the Flag and Bell Summer Party on board the Queen Mary and The Yacht Club ships along Victoria Embankment on Tuesday night. Thanks for coming along.

Congratulations to the 'Mary's Queens' team for achieving a perfect score on the quiz this month. This is a Flag and Bell first. Well done to Rima, Matt and Peter.

Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first bar. Details for the event on the 1st of July coming soon.

Leaving an Artistic Trail

A frustrated trailblazer?

http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com

Search Personas - Evolving the Design

Meg and I are starting to build up "search user personas" for the next phase of the design of Trexy. We're actively looking for people to tell us how they use search engines and what motivates them. Why? So we can tune in the 'interaction design' for the next version of Trexy. We want Trexy to 'scratch an itch' and hit the mark for blog publishers, topic-specific search engines and search users.

We've picked up a lot from attending conferences, the Flag & Bell, and witnessing the sins of search so we already have many pieces of the puzzle but this is a tricky design problem - fortunately we're still having fun solving it!

The Flag and Bell Turns Two

My brother, Nigel, and I started the Flag and Bell event back in May 2006.

Since then, we've had a colourful calendar of events. Some of the highlights include: karaoke sponsored by Bond Marvel, OktoberFest Fun, Chinese New Year Special, Internet World, Dart Night, Queen Mary Thames River Special, and a Christmas Party at SkyPe's office.

We've also seen many a quiz tie-breaker played out with paper, scissors, rock and we've had some interesting networking games. More importantly, the FAB has facilitated business connections, the sharing of ideas and helped people to find work.

Thanks to everyone for coming along and being a part of this event. Details for the event in June coming soon.

Microsoft are Hot on the Trail

Recent research from Microsoft has demonstrated that "search trails" have ...

"profound implications for the design of Web search ranking algorithms and the improvement of the search experience for all search engine users ... "

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/04/search-trails-and-relevance.html

Thanks to Ben from the Flag and Bell for sending me the link.

Time for a Tea Party - Boston Search Engine Meeting

The last month has been really hectic. I moved my home office to Bath in the west of England - the Internet connection is now back up after a long delay and things are kind of getting back to normal - phew! Although the move has been stressful my office now looks over beautiful Bath and I'm really happy to be living there.

Right now I'm in Boston for the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting - I'm speaking after lunch and provided jetlag doesn't strike I'm hoping to join some of the other delegates at a local jazz club later tonight. Time to relax a little before pushing Trexy further into the cloud.