I'm Charlie Hull, The Search Juggler - a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint; I have held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. I am deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies. My past experience in software engineering gives me a highly informed perspective on search technology with a particular focus on open source platforms such as Lucene, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch.  More recently I have helped several companies use modern AI techniques to supercharge search, including Moonpig, the UK's leading online supplier of greeting cards and gifts.

Doug Turnbull (aka softwaredoug) is an expert in search technology and relevance engineering. Most recently Doug worked as Principal Engineer at Daydream, where he built hybrid fashion search systems combining lexical and vector retrieval. Doug has developed LLM-driven search quality programs for e-commerce and social media search. Previously, he led machine-learning-driven search initiatives at Reddit, significantly improving search relevance with Learning to Rank. 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), co-authored AI Powered Search (Manning 2024), and created popular open-source tools, including Quepid and the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin. He regularly speaks at industry conferences, making information retrieval accessible to every engineer.