Search Solutions 2026

Search Solutions 2026 is at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT on Wednesday 25 November, the annual gathering of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group. It's billed as the premier UK forum for the latest innovations in search and information retrieval, and it brings together practitioners, researchers, analysts and end users to talk through the latest developments in the IR community. The whole point is to share insights between research and practice, with a particular focus on the issues practitioners face on the ground.

The conference day is a full programme of presentations, panels and keynote talks, with Radu Gheorghe and Alessandro Benedetti among the confirmed speakers. It closes with the BCS Search Industry Awards and an evening reception, and the day is rounded off by the group's AGM, which anyone can attend for free. If you're into the more hands-on side of things, there's also a Tutorial Day on Tuesday 24 November, though that requires its own separate registration.

To give you a sense of the ground this covers, past tutorials have run through designing usability for search, multimedia information retrieval, evaluation, pattern search, city search in SmartCities, text analysis, an introduction to natural language processing and reinforcement learning, Apache Solr and open-source technologies, Legal IR, and RAG and LLM. It's a broad church, so whether you're coming from the research end or the practical application side, there's usually something that hits home.

The conference day runs from 9:30am to 9:00pm at BCS, Ground Floor, 25 Copthall Avenue, London EC2R 7BP. Tickets are £80 for students, £92 for BCS or ISKO members, and £110 for non-members, with VAT and fees included.