AI-Search Fundamentals: Vector Spaces, Matching, & Ranking

Hosted by Doug Turnbull and Trey Grainger

Fri, Mar 6, 2026

3:30 PM UTC (1 hour 15 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents

Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull

View syllabus

Fri, Mar 6, 2026

3:30 PM UTC (1 hour 15 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents

Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull

View syllabus

What you'll learn

Sparse Vector Spaces and Lexical Search

How does keyword matching work with an inverted index (in contrast with embeddings), and what is a sparse vector space?

Dense Vector Spaces and Semantic Search

How does search over embeddings work with flat/ANN indexes? What are the many kinds of dense vector spaces that exist?

Vector Similarity, TF-IDF / BM25, and relevance ranking

How do we score how "relevant" documents are for a given query? We'll cover cosine similarity and TF-IDF / BM25 scoring.

An overview of contemporary and emerging AI Search methods

We'll summarize the more advanced AI Search methods we'll be teaching in the full AI-Powered Search course

You'll be ready for the AI-Powered Search course!

This session provides all prerequisite knowledge needed for the AI-Powered Search course (please join us!).

Why this topic matters

This session covers foundational concepts in information retrieval around matching and ranking. We'll cover sparse vs. dense vector spaces, lexical (BM25) vs. semantic (embedding) search, and matching and relevance ranking fundamentals. This session is free (open to all) and also provides the prerequisite background needed for anyone to join Trey & Doug's month-long "AI-Powered Search" course.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Principal ML Engineer in Search

Doug Turnbull has led search teams since 2013. He worked on AI in e-commerce going as far back an 2022 at Shopify. Delivered the largest experimental wins on Reddit search, and now advises AI and search teams as they take on modern search challenges. He is co-author of the book AI-Powered Search and teaches on Maven with his Cheat at Search and AI-Powered Search courses.

Trey Grainger

Author, "AI-Powered Search", Founder @ Searchkernel

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 is an instructor of Maven's AI-Powered Search course.

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