About the author
Benjamin Trent is a Lucene committer and member of the project management committee at The Apache Software Foundation and a software engineer at Elastic, where he works on improving Elasticsearch.
Author’s articles
March 20, 2025
Scaling late interaction models in Elasticsearch - part 2
This article explores techniques for making late interaction vectors ready for large-scale production workloads, such as reducing disk space usage and improving computation efficiency.
March 18, 2025
Searching complex documents with ColPali - part 1
The article introduces the ColPali model, a late-interaction model that simplifies the process of searching complex documents with images and tables, and discusses its implementation in Elasticsearch.
February 27, 2025
Filtered HNSW search, fast mode
Explore the improvements we have made for HNSW vector search in Apache Lucene through our ACORN-1 algorithm implementation.
February 7, 2025
Concurrency bugs in Lucene: How to fix optimistic concurrency failures
Thanks to Fray, a deterministic concurrency testing framework from CMU’s PASTA Lab, we tracked down a tricky Lucene bug and squashed it
January 6, 2025
Optimized Scalar Quantization: Improving Better Binary Quantization (BBQ)
Here we explain optimized scalar quantization in Elasticsearch and how we used it to improve Better Binary Quantization (BBQ).
December 27, 2024
Lucene bug adventures: Fixing a corrupted index exception
Sometimes, a single line of code takes days to write. Here, we get a glimpse of an engineer's pain and debugging over multiple days to fix a potential Apache Lucene index corruption.
November 18, 2024
Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) vs. Product Quantization
Why we chose to spend time working on Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) instead of product quantization in Lucene and Elasticsearch.
November 11, 2024
Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) in Lucene and Elasticsearch
How Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) works in Lucene and Elasticsearch.
August 27, 2024
Looking back: Elastic's vector search improvements in Elasticsearch & Lucene
Looking back at Elastic's vector search innovations in Elasticsearch and Lucene.