Doug Turnbull

Cohort 1

July 2025

Achievable, Relevant Search without the PhD Great query and document understanding once took months of dedicated expertise to see results. With AI, you can see wins within weeks or days. Learn how to cut to the heart of your user's search problems, driving relevant, profitable search results.

Practical approach for search teams to adopt LLMs and agentic search

Course syllabus

Mondays

Hands on projects making practical, LLM-driven search a reality

Weekly projects

Fridays

Course schedule

Search teams eager to evolve that crufty-old search engine towards a modern approach

Search startups eager to get a fast start with a modern approach to search, sidestepping old, outdated practices

Team leads and managers excited to organize their work in a way aligned with modern approaches to Relevant Search

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

Help your understaffed search team see better outcomes faster with your search engine

Increase team velocity

Sidestep traditionally complex query and content enrichment with Large Language Models

Cheat at search with LLMs

Learn how there's no longer such a thing as "unstructured search". Turn any piece of query into a structured, well-formed query to your search backend

Make the unstructured, structured

Kick the theoretical to the curb. Deploying LLMs to production has gotten easier and easier. Smaller/local LLMs smarter. Do it all without a big OpenAI bill.

Make it a reality in production

Principal AI Engineer in Search

Navigating your tech career in the age of layoffs and AI

Team Lead at Shopify, Reddit, and AI Startups

Brian Pedersen

Principal, "The Search Bar"

What tools and skills should you acquire to thrive in with ubiquitious AI and looming layoffs?

How can I future-proof my career?

How to match up what makes you happy with the needs of the job market

What does fulfillment look like?

What skills do hiring managers focus on increasingly? What can help you standout on your team, or in the next interview?

What do hiring managers want?

Hybrid search live coded from scratch

Led Search at Shopify, Reddit

Ben Trent

Sr. Principal Engineer Elastic

How a vector search index, like Elasticsearch's, implements filtering using algorithms to combine with lexical retrieval

Internals of hybrid search

As you watch an expert live-code, see where the algorithm falls apart as a real-life expert makes a mistake

See where hybrid search goes wrong

Dense vectors provide specific constraints on retrieval solutions - learn what these are, how they can go wrong

Deepen your vector search knowledge

CTO's Playbook for Faster Agentic RAG

Nirant Kasiwal

Creator FastEmbed

Led Search at Reddit, Shopify, Wikipedia

know exactly when to swap OpenAI for FastEmbed and improve both recall and latency.

Latency vs Recall Cheat-Sheet

live-coded: BM25 + vector ➜ tool-calling agent

Hybrid-to-Agentic Upgrade Path

7-point checklist that spots 90 % of real-world retrieval failures before users do.

Stealable RAG Audit Framework

Build a vector database from scratch (part two)

Eric Pugh

Cofounder OpenSource Connections

Learn the most common graph-based vector search algorithm used in Elasticsearch, Weaviate, QDrant, Pinecone, etc

Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull

Courses

Lightning Lessons