Ben Chaplin https://ben-chaplin.com Writing about problems in tech and math. en-us Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:24:54 GMT How Elasticsearch's batched query phase improves search performance at scale (outside link) https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/elasticsearch-batched-query-phase https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/elasticsearch-batched-query-phase Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Bettering Elasticsearch query time and resource utilization by batching shard queries. Elasticsearch Replica Management in Serverless (outside link) https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/elasticsearch-replica-management-serverless https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/elasticsearch-replica-management-serverless Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT How Elasticsearch Serverless combines two automated systems: one for failover resilience, one for search load balancing. Search for Lost Hands https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20250727_search_for_lost_hands https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20250727_search_for_lost_hands Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT Building a fun little Lucene search that works when your fingers drift on the keyboard. Correlation is Hard https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20250128_correlation_is_hard https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20250128_correlation_is_hard Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Generating a filter that hits a target selectivity and correlation turns out to be trickier than it sounds, so I work through a numeric approach to get there. Building a Bigger HNSW Graph https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241204_building_a_bigger_hnsw_graph https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241204_building_a_bigger_hnsw_graph Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT A follow-up that scales the HNSW example up and ties off the loose ends: how candidate lists are built and what the efConst (beamWidth) parameter actually does. Building an HNSW Graph https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241121_building_an_hnsw_graph https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241121_building_an_hnsw_graph Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT A hands-on walkthrough of building a Hierarchical Navigable Small World graph from scratch, inserting vectors one by one. Just-in-time Loop Unrolling https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241106_jit_loop_unrolling https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241106_jit_loop_unrolling Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Unpacking why Lucene's dot-product code accumulates in chunks of four, and how loop unrolling and the JIT combine to make it faster. Lightweight Search in the Browser with Lunr https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241021_lightweight_search_in_the_browser_with_lunr https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241021_lightweight_search_in_the_browser_with_lunr Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Adding a real search bar to a static, backend-less site by scraping your own pages at build time and indexing them client-side with Lunr. JavaCC and LL(1) Parsers https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241014_javacc_and_ll1_parsers https://ben-chaplin.com/blog/20241014_javacc_and_ll1_parsers Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Chasing down a backslash-escaping bug in an Apache Lucene grammar, and what JavaCC's LL(1) token matching taught me about why it happened.