I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
A fun week of search before Cheat at Search starts
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It's the final week before my Cheat at Search with Agents course. But we've got a fun tailgaite party before the big event ๐. Agent harnesses are dead - long live harnessesToday, 7PM ET - https://maven.com/p/6dc9ef/building-effective-agent-harnessesโ Search backend design means agent design. Hugo Bowne Anderson lives by a KISS ethos - Keep it Simple Smartypants. He talks real-life production LLM + harness design. You don't need to chase the latest OpenClaw -> Hermes -> Claude Code design patterns to build a good search agent. Cheat at Search Essentials continuesTuesday + Thursday, 12PM - https://maven.com/lls/5c240bโ โCheat at Search Essentials teaches the basics of search + retrieval. It assumes zero context, catching you up on decades of search and Information Retrieval. You can watch the recording of Friday's class. This week I'll teach about Embeddings + Vector Search (Tuesday) and Search Evaluation (Thursday). Come to both or just one! Where search teams go wrong in 2026Friday, 12PM - https://maven.com/p/aa3d9c/where-are-teams-going-wrong-with-searchโ I'll be chatting with Trey Grainger, author of AI Powered Search. We'll discuss the mistakes we see search teams make in 2026. Either chasing the wrong hype (or not chasing the correct hype!). We'll also contrast trainings - the Cheat at Search course vs AI Powered Search. Bring your questions! --------- All leading up to: Cheat at Search w/ Agents starts in one week!We're watching a search inflection point - as consequential as the introduction of embeddings. When agents, not rerankers, drive relevance we need to rethink how we work as search practitioners. Guest speakers from IBM, Sid.ai, Hornet, and LightOn to help us think through how search is being changed. Signup here - http://maven.com/softwaredoug/cheat-at-search - use code search-tips. -Doug โSlack Community * Events ยท Consulting ยท 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.
Give an agent a set of search tools, it finds relevant products and improves result ranking. So should we throw away our traditional search stack and just let an agent drive some retrievers? Will the future of search APIs just be an agent, not query understanding or reranking? Here's the rub - finding things with agent's help differs from helping agents find information. In one case, the agent helps us. In the other, we must help the agent find what it doesn't know. This last case can't work...
Search community happenings for this week! 2026 is the year of agentic search w/ Jo Kristian Bergum Thursday 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...
Talks this week + other events. Hope you can make it and help keep this community awesome ๐ First - Leonie Monigatti will share how Context Engineering IS Agentic Search. Tuesday, 10:30AM ET What everyone is missing: when people talk aobut "context engineering", they really ought to be improving search. Leonie will cast aside myths about context engineering to show how agents build their own context via retrieval. And THAT, not prompting magic, decides whether your AI app is successful....