What is agentic search? (and why should I care!?)

Hosted by Doug Turnbull

Fri, Dec 12, 2025

5:30 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

68 students

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Go deeper with a course

'Relevant Search' masterclass
Doug Turnbull and Nick Zadrozny
View syllabus

What you'll learn

Let agents take control of your search

A good agent can plan and reason, turning a user's query into a plan to use even basic search tools to explore a corpus

How Agentic RAG wins over traditional RAG

Traditional RAG gives you one chance to formulate a query and get the right information for the user.

How to inject the user's perspective

An agent uses its own judgment on whether the returned content helps the user. Go beyond this with user input.

Why this topic matters

If an agent can reason and use tools, it can solve search! Why struggle against complex query understanding and reranking models when you have an agent? Learn how agents turn even the most basic search tools into a useful search experience

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Search Consultant

Doug Turnbull helps clients build better agentic search systems. 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.


Previously at

Reddit
Shopify.com
Wikipedia
LexisNexis
OpenSource Connections

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