IR Today: Theory, Practice, and Agents

Daniel Tunkelang is an independent consultant specializing in search, information retrieval, and machine learning / AI, with a focus on query understanding, ranking, and large-scale retrieval systems. He was part of the founding team at Endeca and has held leadership roles in search at Google and LinkedIn. He has since advised organizations including Apple, Algolia, Canva, eBay, Etsy, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Zoom on search and discovery systems, helping them improve relevance and retrieval quality at scale. His work bridges classical information retrieval models and modern ML/AI approaches, with an emphasis on practical system design and evaluation.

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?