Are we all doing "retrieval" wrong?... a candid discussion.

Hosted by Andreas Wagner, Trey Grainger, and Doug Turnbull

Tue, Mar 3, 2026

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents
Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Agentic and Hybrid Search don’t easily “solve retrieval”

Retrieval use cases often need distinctly different data, algorithmic approaches, and UX per domain and per context.

Search is a dynamic ecosystem

Retrieval is way more than picking great embeddings and keyword search tools. It needs critical additional capabilities.

Relevance is a moving target needing ongoing feedback loops

Retrieval engines should constantly adapt to content, domain knowledge, & behavior. They can’t be both static & optimal.

How the experts actually implement retrieval

Real strategies, from experimentation & domain-specific evals, to the algorithms that move the needle on search quality.

Why this topic matters

Modern retrieval usually focuses on static algorithms (BM25, vector, and hybrid search) and models (embeddings, cross-encoders, etc.), decomposing search into isolated features or tools (for an agent). But is this the wrong approach? We’ll discuss why this often hits a wall and when more systematic approaches with continuous feedback loops (user signals, UX, evals, business KPIs, etc.) are needed.

You'll learn from

Andreas Wagner

Co-Founder & CTO @ searchHub.io

Andreas Wagner is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in retail and eCommerce. He specializes in building and optimizing search and recommender systems at scale. As CTO and strategist at searchHub.io, he focuses on end-to-end relevance, helping organizations turn search into a measurable growth driver that truly understands user intent.

Trey Grainger

Founder @ Searchkernel, Author "AI-Powered Search"

Trey is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search and is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey in an instructor for the AI-Powered Search course on Maven.

Doug Turnbull

Search and Snuggie Enthusiast

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. He wants to 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?

Previously at

searchHub
Reddit
Wikipedia
CareerBuilder
Shopify.com

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