I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
Can agents replace your search stack?
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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 without traditional retrieval work. More in my latest blog - https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/04/28/search-apis-replaced-by-agents Best, -Doug PS 3 weeks away from my Cheat at Search w/ Agents class - use code search-tips for a discount. 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...