Doug Turnbull
Free series

Cheat at Search Essentials

"New to search and retrieval? Need to catch up on decades of industry developments? Learn the core concepts of retrieval. How is search evaluated? What does BM25 mean? How does a search engine work? What is an embedding or a vector database? This short series gives you the ""ELI5"" (Explain Like I'm 5) overview of search and how it works, preparing you for other search course on the Maven platform"

May 8 – May 14, 2026
Virtual (Zoom)

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Fri May 8·4:00 PM UTC

Cheat at Search Essentials: BM25 + Lexical Retrieval

It's often said with agents, search has become the hard problem. Search has a long history and means more than vector databases. Let's learn how BM25 and similar techniques compliment your vector database. And why you might not want to always reach for embeddings. Part of "Cheat at Search - Essentials" intro to search course

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Led search teams at Reddit, Shopify, Wikipedia, and more

Tue May 12·4:00 PM UTC

Cheat at Search Essentials: Embedding Retrieval

For decades, search techniques were dominated by lexical search. IE some form of 'dumb token matching'. Yet in the last decade, embedding based retrieval has completely upended that paradigm, giving us results focused on semantic search before strings.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Led search teams at Reddit, Shopify, Wikipedia, and more

Thu May 14·4:00 PM UTC

Cheat at Search Essentials: Evaluation, NDCG, and pals

To get better at search, know the core metrics teams have historically used to evaluate search. See where they stop working, and what to do about them.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Ex-Reddit, Ex-Shopify. Author: AI Powered Search+Relevant Search

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