I am a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint; I have held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. I am deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies. My past experience in software engineering gives me a highly informed perspective on search technology with a particular focus on open source platforms such as Lucene, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. More recently I have helped several companies use modern AI techniques to supercharge search. I co-wrote Searching the Enterprise, ran the Haystack conference for 5 years and held leadership positions at OpenSource Connections and Flax.