New from the OSC search team: A Year of Transformation for Learning to Rank in OpenSearch - https://lnkd.in/e4xav8xv
OpenSource Connections
IT Services and IT Consulting
Charlottesville, Virginia 1,769 followers
We empower organizations to transform through strategic implementation of Search and AI
About us
We understand that search and AI can feel overwhelming. At OpenSource Connections, our mission is to help you make sense of these technologies and find the right path forward for your business. Whether you’re part of a large search team or handling search among many other responsibilities, we know that success doesn’t come from a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it’s about meeting you where you are and guiding you toward achievable goals that fit your organization’s unique situation. We’re here to support you with deep expertise and practical solutions to help your search and AI systems thrive: Thoughtful Consulting: We’ll walk you through every step, from assessing where you are to identifying how you can improve and to measuring the impacts of those improvements. This includes evaluating the quality of your search and AI, helping you choose the right technologies, and optimizing your current solutions. We also provide guidance on organizational processes that help teams function better. Hands-on Support: When you need more than advice, our team is ready to step in—whether that’s working alongside you on a project or providing additional capacity by embedding our experts into your team. Tailored Training: Our goal is to equip your team with the skills and knowledge to keep improving. Through our training, we ensure that you don’t just understand search and AI—you feel confident in making them work for you. At OSC, we’re not just here to offer solutions; we’re here to be your partners, helping you navigate the challenges and celebrate the successes along the way.
- Website
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http://www.opensourceconnections.com
External link for OpenSource Connections
- Industry
- IT Services and IT Consulting
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- Charlottesville, Virginia
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2005
- Specialties
- Search, Relevancy Tuning, RAG, OpenSearch, Search and AI evaluation, Training, Vector Search, AI, Search and AI in organizations, Solr, Lucene, and Elasticsearch
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
1006 E Market St
C
Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, US
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Get directions
Pappelallee 78/79
Berlin, Berlin 10437, DE
Employees at OpenSource Connections
Updates
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Congrats to Daniel Wrigley and Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya for a stellar fourth and final BASED Meetup of 2025! Check out the recap below:
BASED Meetup number 4 2025: From the Community, For the Community! As the year comes to a close, Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya and I were thrilled to host the fourth and final BASED meetup of 2025! This edition truly felt special, marking our most community-driven event yet: - Massive thanks to IntraFind Software AG for partnering with us as a venue and sponsor for drinks and snacks! Finding supportive partners is the most challenging part, and we couldn't have done it without them. - We found all three fantastic speakers at our previous event in October, making this edition a true testament to the strength and engagement of our community! The talks were incredibly insightful and resonated deeply: - Christoph Goller shared a critical, research-backed view on why embedding-based search is not yet the silver bullet for all search applications. A great reminder to always measure and challenge the hype around vector search! - Phan Van Nguyen Duc detailed his inspiring journey building an app to help immigrants navigate the complexities of German bureaucracy. A topic that will (sadly) probably never get old. - Mikayla Webster gave an excellent overview of her learnings while building an evaluation platform, including using LLMs for generating judgments. It was particularly cool, having met Mikayla two years ago at a search result quality training, to see her present on this topic! The networking session with pizza and drinks was, as always, a lot of fun - making new connections and catching up with existing ones. All in all, a very rewarding experience! Mark your calendars! Our next event is planned for March 26th, 2026! Interested in getting involved as a host, sponsor, or speaker? Please let us know! 👇 Links to slides, subscribe to our event calendar and how to join our Telegram group will be in the comments. #vectorsearch #ai #evaluation #llms #meetup #community
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OpenSource Connections reposted this
AI is not a differentiator! Last week I attended the KMWorld Conference, which I really enjoyed as it gave great insights into where the Knowledge Management community is. At some point I went from vendor booth to vendor booth and wrote down their slogans: - "Supercharge your Knowledge Management with AI" - "Your Knowledge Management Amplified by Agentic AI" - "Your secure AI Meeting Assistant" - "Work AI for All" - "LLM-Powered Record Intelligence" - "Future-ready Intranet for a Connected Employee Experience" - "AI for employee experience" - "Trustworthy AI Agents that Actually Get Work done" - "Work faster with your AI team" - "Find what matters faster" - "Transform and scale Knowledge Management with AI" I know that a lot of brilliant minds work at these vendors but here it felt like I was looking at one big blob with the "AI" label on it. While one could probably say that this is bad marketing and bad strategy in most of these cases (shouldn't we tell the market what differentiates us from others and why customers should _choose_ our offering?), it is also indicative of the fact that in many cases companies think that AI brings a value per se for them and their customers. AI is not a differentiator and there is no moat in it. Everyone can use it. But it allows us to solve customer problems more efficiently and more creatively. And that - together with what differentiates us from other solution or services providers - is what we should put back at the center of our offerings and not the tool that we are using for implementation. For us at OpenSource Connections (https://lnkd.in/dyrqbS54), this goes along with our observations related to the maturity of teams related to search. While they often approach us thinking of search as a technical solution, we usually find the most impactful area for them to move ahead being in understanding search and what problem it solves for the user.
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OpenSource Connections reposted this
Für uns als Consultants waren es zwei spannende Tage, mit einem tollen, motivierten Würth-Team und großartigen Einsichten in die Produkte und Services, welche Ihr Euren Kunden anbietet. Auf zum nächsten Meilenstein in Sachen besserer Produktsuche! ;-) #LetsDoIt #GoTeam!
𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐮𝐦 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐠𝐫𝐨ß𝐞 𝐈𝐓 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐤𝐭𝐞 𝐯𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐮ß𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐧? 🤓 Diese Woche war ein großer Meilenstein in Sachen Produktsuche. Nicht nur, dass wir OpenSource Connections zu Gast hatten, die uns zwei Tage lang auf links gedreht und unsere Erkenntnisse aus der Projektdiscovery gechallenged haben. Es war auch eine der seltenen Gelegenheiten, zu denen wir einmal das ganze Projektteam und viele Kontributoren und Stakeholder in einem Raum und an einem Tisch im neuen Headquarter der Würth IT GmbH hatten. Aber warum braucht es eigentlich externes Consulting in so einem Projekt, wenn doch schon so viel Expertise in einem Raum sitzt? Die Frage ließ mir keine Ruhe und so habe ich recherchiert. 🧠 Unser Gehirn steht im Verdacht, denn es beherrscht die 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐭 weit besser als die 𝐀𝐮ß𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐭. Was in Coaching und Psychotherapie gelebte Praxis ist, sollte doch erst recht für Unternehmen gelten, oder? Insbesondere 𝐤𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 spielen uns gerne Streiche. Das sind "Abkürzungen", mit denen sich unser Gehirn komplexe Sachverhalte zurechtlegt. 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐢 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐠𝐧𝐞𝐭: 👓 Der bekannteste ist sicherlich der 𝐃𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐊𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐤𝐭, und das ist hier nicht despektierlich gemeint. Als Organisation wissen wir in der Innenischt nicht, wo wir von außen betrachtet Wissenslücken haben. Ganze Themenkomplexe können so untergehen, wenn uns nicht jemand von außen daran erinnert. ✅ Gerade in großen Projekten spielt auch der 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬 eine Rolle. Je mehr Leute wir fragen, desto mehr Meinungen bringen wir ins Projekt, und das Gehirn liebt, was die eigenen Präferenzen bestätigt. So entsteht in einem großen Projekt schnell viel kognitives Gepäck, das uns eine objektive Sicht verstellt. ➡️ 𝐊𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐇𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐧 ist sicherlich auch ein Faktor. Wenn das Gehirn einmal auf einem Handlungspfad ist, fällt es ihm schwer, ihn wieder zu verlassen. So braucht vielleicht Mut, um dem Senior Management zu sagen, dass die Aussage aus dem letzten Meeting nun doch zurück ans Reißbrett muss. Allzu schnell ertappt man sich dabei, wie man die neue Architektur automatisch um bestehende Teamstrukturen und die Teams um bestehende Komponenten herum strickt. Die Liste der Beispiele lässt sich beliebig fortsetzen. 💼 Und genau da kommt externe Expertise ins Spiel - ganz nach dem Prinzip der "𝐃𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐤𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" ergänzen sich Außensicht und Innensicht gegenseitig und hebeln so kognitive Biases aus. Von außen kommen Best Practices, Benchmarks, Marktwissen oder in unserem Fall auch viel technisches Detailwissen. Von innen kommen Business Driver, technische Abhängigkeiten, Organisationswissen und Strategiefaktoren. Die Projektteams gehen jedenfalls mit neuem Selbstbewusstsein an die nächsten Schritte. #LetsDoIT✅
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Want to dramatically speed up your search relevance tuning? Check out Daniel Wrigley and Stavros Macrakis' Haystack EU presentation - link is below.
How can we move search relevance tuning from a months-long process to a matter of days? The answer lies in combining two powerful techniques: Agents and Interleaved A/B Testing. This is the core of the Agentic Search Relevance Tuning approach I presented recently at Haystack EU together with Stavros Macrakis. For most companies, the manual iteration process for search relevance is measured in weeks, if not months. This slows down innovation. Our talk shows the multi-agent architecture we envision to overcome this. We discussed the key concepts for achieving this speedup: - The Problem with the Status Quo: The "Virtuous Circle of Search Improvement" shows the tuning stage is often based on "numerology" and is the slowest link. - Traditional A/B Test Limitations: Why some A/B testing methods take weeks or even months to achieve statistically significant results, slowing down the speed of innovation. - The Agentic Solution: Using Agents to run the tuning process, automating hypothesis generation, offline testing, and configuration creation. - The Key to Speed: Introducing Interleaved A/B Testing, which shows a single user results from both engine A and B simultaneously, dramatically accelerating the time-to-significance. This is the path to moving from engineering drudgery to automated, goal-driven relevance improvements. Watch the full session here and let me know your thoughts: https://lnkd.in/dzi_Gbbw What is the single biggest challenge in your current search relevance pipeline? #SearchRelevance #AIAgents #haystackconf
Haystack EU 2025: Stavros Macrakis & Daniel Wrigley – Agentic search tuning: faster and better
https://www.youtube.com/
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🚀 Don't miss OpenSource Connections' René Kriegler as he takes the stage at Brains on Silicon - Europe's leading AI conference - this Thursday, 23 October in Dresden. In his session, Rene will dive into how search technology and AI create a powerful synergy that transforms user experiences. ➡️ Session: "Search and AI: A case study in Mutual Acceleration" Discover: ✨ How search and AI amplify each other's capabilities ✨ Practical strategies for implementing AI-powered search Don't miss Rene and 40+ other AI experts as they uncover the latest in AI applications that can transform your business. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eBJfK547 #brainsonsilicon #bos25 #SearchandAI #OpenSourceConnections
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OpenSource Connections reposted this
I'm very excited to be a speaker at the Brains on Silicon event later this month! Dresden, 22 / 23 October, https://lnkd.in/dgkJD7FZ Based on a case study of a RAG system (that actually is in production!), I will show how #search and #AI can accelerate each other in the development process of such a product. Hope to see you there!
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🎥 Haystack EU 2025 presentations are now live! This year’s event brought together some of the brightest minds in search and AI—and now you can watch every session. Highlights include: ✨ Using LLM-as-a-judge evaluation in RAG systems ✨ Measuring multimodal search quality ✨ Future-proofing e-commerce search architecture ✨ Leveraging AI to strengthen information trust and accuracy Whether you're building RAG systems, scaling search infrastructure, or exploring AI applications—these sessions offer actionable insights you can apply immediately. 👉 Watch the full playlist: https://lnkd.in/erdnubU5 #haystackconf #SearchandAI
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We were thrilled to have you Olena Gorbatiuk, Atita Arora and Angeley Mullins - your presentation was excellent and so valuable. Thank you for being a part of Haystack EU 2025! #womenofsearch #haystackconf #agenticsearch
🚀 Haystack brought together so many brilliant minds pushing the boundaries of search and AI. I was excited to represent the Women in Search community at the Haystack Conference 🤩 I shared the stage with amazing speakers Atita Arora and Angeley Mullins and spoke about AI Agents: from hype to reality. #haystackconf #aipoweredsearch #womenofsearch
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⭐ Haystack EU 2025 Day 2: More amazing insights and connections Another phenomenal day at Haystack EU 2025! The conversations around search and AI continue to get deeper and more exciting with every session. Some of today's standout moments: 💡Fascinating Women of Search presentation on AI Agents featuring Angeley Mullins, Olena Gorbatiuk, and Atita Arora - truly compelling insights into building AI agents that solve real problems. 🎁 Special raffle excitement - we gave away signed copies and online versions of Trey Grainger's "AI-Powered Search" (congrats to our lucky winners!) ✨ More incredible presentations covering the latest developments in our industry The hallway conversations have been just as valuable as the sessions themselves - there's nothing quite like connecting with this amazing community of search and AI professionals. The knowledge sharing and collaboration happening here is truly inspiring. #haystackconf #aipoweredsearch #WomenofSearch
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