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.
An agent with grep does quite well at search. It’s shocking to search technologists. We want to cocoon the problem in technology. We care about algorithms, knowledge graphs, ranking: ever-and-ever smarter retrieval. It turns out, though, you can play a bit of a trick. If you convince everyone to optimize content for your search engine, you’ll have built the best search engine. There’s Sutton’s bitter lesson about unleashing raw compute on a problem. But there’s a different bitter lesson in...
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 -...