I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
Underrated: retention; overrated: conversions (daily search tip)
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Have you been to a conversion-crazy site? It’s nuts. Their site screams at you. They probably have the modern version of the HTML blink tag. Popups everywhere just won't go away. Buy buy buy! It’s fun to go to a physical store when you can browse the shelves, talk to customer service, and get help. People avoid stores lacking information and only high pressure salespeople in your face. If your search stinks of pressure, users will retreat. They’ll stay on Google. They win precisely because they don’t push you. Before obsessing over conversion:
User acquisition and retention can be a blindspot for search teams. Make sure its not for your team! -Doug 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.
Reviewing Bayesian BM25 - a new approach to creating calibrated BM25 probabilities for hybrid search. I talk about this vs naive approaches I've used to do similar things. Enjoy! https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/03/06/probabilistic-bm25-utopia -Doug 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:
You may know BM25 lets you tune two parameters: k1: how quickly to saturate document term frequency’s contribution b: how much to bias towards below average length docs What you may NOT know is there is another parameter k3 What does k3 do? It handles repeated query terms. Old papers suggest k3=100 to 1000, which immediately saturates. That’s why Lucene ignores k3. It just uses the query term frequency. Some other search engines like Terrier set it to 8. So for the query, “Best dog toys for...
Rare terms have high inverse document frequency (IDF). BM25 scoring treats high IDF terms as more relevant. Why? We assume if a term occurs rarely in the corpus, it must unambiguously point to what the user wants. It’s specific. But that’s not always true. Not all text is created equal. Corpuses violate this assumption frequently. Why? No need to use a common term - Book titles may rarely mention the word “book”, but clearly “book” in a book index has low specificity. Language gaps between...