Hybrid Search Is Just The Beginning: Optimizing the R in RAG

Lightning Lessons

Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

Hybrid Search Is Just The Beginning: Optimizing the R in RAG

Hosted by Doug Turnbull and Hamel Husain

940 students

What you'll learn

Test and measure your search improvements

Discover how to evaluate each component of your hybrid search system to know exactly what's working and what isn't.

Master the tiered candidate strategy for maximum relevance

Learn a systematic approach to structuring your search queries that goes beyond basic hybrid methods.

Implement high-impact techniques from the field

Learn the specific approaches Doug has deployed at companies like Shopify and Reddit that consistently deliver results.

Why this topic matters

You may have implemented hybrid search, and that's a great first step. In this session, Doug will share his experience building advanced search systems at Shopify and Reddit to provide you with a clear map for your next steps. You'll learn practical techniques for taking your search beyond basic hybrid methods, with real-world examples .

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Led Search at Reddit and Shopify. Expert in information retrieval systems.

Doug Turnbull 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.

Hamel Husain

ML Engineer with 20 years of experience.

Hamel Husain is a ML Engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies operationalize Large Language Models (LLMs).

Previously at