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.
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...