Hacker-Pschorr Bräu beer labels

Schloßbräu München

St. Hubertus Bier

Animator

Pschorr

And no, Löbrau is not a Hacker-Pschorr beer.

ElasticSearch Invades Trade.mar.cx

Here at Trade.mar.cx, we have exciting news! We have been working behind the scenes
to upgrade our site to give some greatly enhanced capabilities and give you ever
better abilities to search within our annals and find trademarks.

Our major upgrade is largely centered around a change in the software that we are
using on our backend to store the content. We have begun using ElasticSearch.
What is that you say? “It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful,
Search Engine built on top of Lucene.” Now that is a lot of information so I’ll
go through it bit by bit and go into what that means for us and you, our users.

Open Source

We at Trade.mar.cx loves open source and so we are really excited that we could
switch to a more powerful backend that was also open source. This continues our
policy here at Trade.mar.cx of only using open source technologies. We use:

1. Apache (Web Server)
2. ElasticSearch (Search Engine Framework)
3. Java (Programming Language)
4. Lucene (Document Search Framework)
5. MySQL (Database Server)
6. Nginx (Web Server)
7. Ruby (Programming Language)
8. Tire (Ruby Library for Interacting With ElasticSearch)
9. Sinatra (Web Site/Service Microframework)

This means that we can develop quickly and cheaply and if we find a bug, we
can actually dive in and fix it for the most part.

Distributed

We love that we are moving a more distributed backend for our data. This
software choice means that we will be able to scale almost infinitely with
very little trouble. This means that we can make your experience faster and
better. In addition, this allows us to bring more content more quickly as well.
We are leveraging this distributed nature by running a very powerful local indexing
box here at Trade.mar.cx headquarters and then the results generated locally are
synced up to the servers that we have sitting on the network. This allows us to
give you a very powerful experience while spending less money for servers.

RESTful

This means that it offers a very consistent and easy to understand interface
for making queries. This simplifies our work and makes it easy for us to build
complex, amazing, or just drop dead simple queries easily and quickly. This service
accepts and returns JSON, a very efficient data transmission format as well a format
that code in your web browser can easily use to make your experience ever better.

Lucene

We are exciting for working with Lucene for a lot of reasons most of them are summed
up by this blurb from Wikipedia:

“Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. While suitable for any application which requires full text indexing and searching capability, Lucene has been widely recognized [1][2] for its utility in the implementation of Internet search engines and local, single-site searching. At the core of Lucene’s logical architecture is the idea of a document containing fields of text. This flexibility allows Lucene’s API to be independent of the file format. Text from PDFs, HTML, Microsoft Word, and OpenDocument documents, as well as many others, can all be indexed as long as their textual information can be extracted.” (Wikipedia : Lucene)

Interestingly, the only trademark we have for Lucene is from a company in Korean named LG Chemical, LTD. They are actually the largest Korean chemical company and are the ones responsible for designing and manufacturing the lithium ion batteries for the new Chevrolet Volt.

Why We’re Excited

We are really excited about the things that this transition allows us to do. We have started by
revamping our search, autocomplete bar, and related trademarks facets. These are now 100% backed
by ElasticSearch and are producing tons better results for you. We were using MySQL full text search
before . Check it out:

On top of what we have already done, we intend to leverage this new infrastructure to launch new
things. Hope to come include:

1. Advanced Search
2. Search Between Dates
3. Wikipedia Search
4. Online Man Pages with Search

We’ll Keep You Posted,
Andrew Gall

Tainted Cucumbers? It’s Pickle Time!!

With everyone pointing fingers at the humble cucumber these days, and in defense of this delicious and varied vegetable, we remind people they actually store for a very long time in the form of pickles! It’s spring after all, that magic time of year when every glint of sunshine suggests an impromptu barbecue or picnic is in order. What of those ideas would be complete without the pickle?

Support the cucumber and get a jar today! For the brave adults, keep the brine for dirty martinis or the renownd “pickle-back”: a shot of whiskey chased with pickle juice..mmm.