Underrated: Elasticsearch for vector search + AI

Hosted by Doug Turnbull and Philipp Krenn

Fri, Aug 29, 2025

4:30 PM UTC (45 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Cheat at Search with LLMs
Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Why you want a search engine, not just a vector DB

How a search engine like Elasticsearch combines decades of Information Retrieval with vector retrieval innovations

Elasticsearch's vector search innovations

Learn about BBQ and other optimizations Elasticsearch has developed in vector retrieval

Elasticsearch for AI and RAG

How Elasticsearch's new features help target emerging use-cases like RAG

Why this topic matters

Elasticsearch may be the world's most ubiquitous search engine and vector database. But do you know how to maximally leverage its latest capabilities? Operating at kilobyte or petabyte scale, learn how organizations are getting the most out of the latest innovations in vector search, hybrid retrieval, RAG, and other emerging use Information Retrieval cases.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Principal Consultant, SoftwareDoug LLC

Doug Turnbull aka SoftwareDoug is an expert in search technology and relevance engineering, currently serving as Principal Engineer at Daydream, where he builds hybrid search systems combining lexical and vector retrieval, and develops LLM-driven quality programs for e-commerce search. Previously, he led machine-learning-driven search initiatives at Reddit, significantly improving search relevance through Learning to Rank methods. Doug also advanced e-commerce search at Shopify and served as CTO at OpenSource Connections. He co-authored the influential book Relevant Search (Manning, 2016) and created popular open-source tools, including Quepid and the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin. He regularly speaks at industry conferences, making search relevance accessible to engineers.

Philipp Krenn

Head of DevRel at Elastic

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for over ten years, Philipp is now a developer advocate and community team lead in EMEA at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in Vienna, Austria, he is constantly traveling Europe and beyond to speak and discuss open source software, search, databases, infrastructure, and security.

Previously at

Elastic
Shopify.com
Wikipedia
Reddit

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