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 😀. Agent harnesses are dead - long live harnessesToday, 7PM ET - https://maven.com/p/6dc9ef/building-effective-agent-harnesses​ 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/5c240b​ ​Cheat 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-search​ 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 ​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.
Hey all, Just a note tomorrow I'll be giving a talk on High-Scale Agent Memory in Turbopuffer Its a first step into a larger world! Agent memory helps new sessions feel like they're continuing a conversation not restarting one. Come, have fun, see the mistakes I've made, and get an intro to Turbopuffer. Event link - https://maven.com/p/e48f16/high-scale-agentic-memory-with-turbopuffer Cheers, -Doug Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code search-tips) You're subscribed to...
This week the Retrieval Augmented Gathering online conference continues! Last week we explored index-only SPLADE, got a demo of tensors in the search engine, and how to think of agentic memory as telemetry. This week we've got talks below: Embeddings don't solve RAG (today) Solving retrieval for agents isn't as simple as chunk + embed. For one, similarity is not relevance. An decides what's relevant depending on not just raw text, but everything that 'surrounds' it. Places it in context....
I've spent the last several years building query classifiers with LLMs. Now Jev has arrived, making this process simpler, faster, and more accurate. I decided to sit down with a simple query understanding task with Jev. It let me make better tradeoffs in recall / precision, while being an order of magnitude faster / cheaper Enjoy: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/09/22/jev-query-understanding.html -Doug Slack Community * Events · Consulting · Training (use code search-tips) You're...