I share search tips, blog articles, and free events I'm hosting about the search+retreval industry, vector databases, information retrieval and more.
You don't need a vector database
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There's a class of search problems where:
Don't get hoodwinked into buying a vector database. Just brute-force search your embeddings. A naive Numpy search can do exhaustive vector search at 170QPS. You can replicate and copy that data to scale even further. More in my blog article: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/29/just-brute-force-embeddings Wectors Week + Context CampA reminder to come hang out with me at two mini-conferences we have going on. One focused on practical embedding retrieval, the other about the intersection of Context Engineering + Search.
Looking forward to seeing you! -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.
Over the next two weeks, Trey Grainger and I are hosting a free online conference, The Future of AI Search w/ talks from some of your favorite search people. The lineup Unreasonable Effectiveness of BM25 for Agentic Search by Hornet.dev founder Jo Kristian-Bergum Introducing Luxir: Can we build the fastest search engine? by Solr creator Yonik Seeley Building topk-embed-v1: frontier multi-vector embeddings by Marek Galovic, CEO Top K Can a Decision Model Think like a Search Engineer by David...
In a Jev reranker you ask Jev to give P(Yes) of the answer to a question like Is this document relevant to the query? And you rank by P(yes) It works! But... that's kinda boring. I think we can do better: we could also have an LLM generate the questions per query. IE query "desk for kids" has us evaluate products with criteria like Is it less than 36 inches? Is it a playful design? Does it explicitly say its designed for children? Then rerank this query using the sum of P(yes) of those...
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...