A week has gone by now since Haystack 2024 EU took place in Berlin. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend in person, but as the organizers made it available to join the sessions remotely, I happily marked the days in the calendar, eager to listen about the latest innovations in information retrieval and case studies from fellow search engineers. Read on for a quick summary of conference.

I did a presentation on Phonetic Matching with Apache Solr some time ago. The slide deck is now available at Slideshare. The presentation introduces the challenges of phonetic matching using Soundex and its variations. We'll learn about the limitations of Soundex algorithms before moving on to the Beider-Morse algorithm. The slide decks shows how to integrate Beider-Morse into your Solr setup and discusses its benefits as part of an evaluation performed on a large set of real-world data.