I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
2026 is the year of agentic search + Haystack
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Search community happenings for this week! 2026 is the year of agentic search w/ Jo Kristian BergumThursday April 30th - https://maven.com/p/a4f265/2026-will-be-the-year-of-agentic-search What's happening in Information Retrieval in 2026? Agentic search! This is THE topic everyone is focused on. Agents searching for us. Agents performing deep research. Agentic models like SID-1 focused on fast search (replacing your search API?). And so on and on. I'll be hosting a conversation with Jo Kristian as we try and navigate what this topic means for search teams. Bring your questions! Haystack - next week 😱May 5-7 - http://haystackconf.com Haystack is coming NEXT WEEK. Come hang out with me in person! Get your tickets before they're gone. Haystack is:
Trey Grainger and I will be speaking, so hope to see you there. (Haystack attendees get 30% off my Cheat at Search course - just reply to this email to ask) Free Search 101 courseStarts May 9 - https://maven.com/lls/5c240b What is BM25? Why do we still use keyword search? What is an embedding exactly? How do vector databases work? WTF is NDCG? If you're new to search. Or just want to fill in some gaps, come hang out at Cheat at Search Essentials. All leads into my Cheat at Search w/ Agents course starting up May 18! -Doug Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code search-tips) You're subscribed to Doug Turnbull's daily search tips where I share tips, blog articles, events, and more. You can always manage your profile: |
Doug Turnbull
I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
Agentic search gets interesting when agents do not know how to find the right answer. Oh, the agent might think it knows. It might confidently BS us. But the agent’s poor domain intuition steers itself astray. Agents make false assumptions about what our users think is relevant. Our fashionista users think “red shoes” should return high-heels. When I worked at one company ABE wasn’t a president, it was an A/B testing tool. Agents need context to know these things - and context engineering...
Upcoming events in the next week or so Show us your skills w/ Hugo Bowne-Anderson Thursday May 28th - https://luma.com/ltpzpqgw Pray to the demo gods! I'll be joining Hugo Bowne-Anderson's "Show us your skills" event on Luma - highlighting using a coding agent to optimize search rankers.. Come hang out if you want to see how others in the industry leverage agentic AI to build in their domain. User search trends in 2026 Monday June 1 -...
At Haystack I spoke about autoresearch: Code generation to optimize search rankers. Can we use it to improve on BM25? This article represents my lab notes. My agent starts with a BM25 implementation, proposes changes, and accepts those that improve NDCG. We’ll zero-in on passage retrieval dataset MSMarco. I won’t claim I’ve found a “better BM25” but I’ve iterated towards a decent tuning regime. All while learning valuable lessons about how validation data can leak. Let’s walk through what...