Cheating at Query Understanding with LLMs

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Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

Cheating at Query Understanding with LLMs

Hosted by Jason Liu and Doug Turnbull

Wed, Sep 24, 2025

6:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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Invite your network

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Systematically Improving RAG Applications

Jason Liu

View syllabus

Wed, Sep 24, 2025

6:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

Systematically Improving RAG Applications

Jason Liu

View syllabus

What you'll learn

LLM-Powered Query Understanding Fundamentals

Learn core principles for using LLMs to extract entities and classify user search intent at scale.

Practical Implementation Strategies

Master proven techniques for deploying LLM query understanding across e-commerce and search platforms.

Performance Optimization for Production

Discover methods to scale LLM query processing while maintaining accuracy and response times.

Why this topic matters

LLMs transformed query understanding from months-long NLP projects into simple prompting tasks. Students learn practical skills for modern search, RAG, and e-commerce systems. This positions you for high-impact AI roles, dramatically reducing dev time while improving user experience across search products.

You'll learn from

Jason Liu

Consultant at the intersection of Information Retrieval and AI

Jason has built search and recommendation systems for the past 6 years. He has consulted and advised a dozens startups in the last year to improve their RAG systems. He is the creator of the Instructor Python library.

Doug Turnbull

Principal Consultant

Doug Turnbull has been enthusiastic about search and retrieval since 2013. He co-authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search. He created open source tools such as Quepid, Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin, and SearchArray.

Doug recently worked for Daydream. His hybrid search solutions using CLIP models led to a doubling in conversions (purchase in saves) in Daydream's e-commerce AI search. Doug's recent work on ML ranking at Reddit created a 2% increase in DAU, the largest seen in Reddit search history. Recently Doug worked at Shopify to help improve merchant search attributed revenue by 10% year over year.. Doug spent 8 years consulting at dozens of organizations during his time as CTO at OpenSource Connections.

Doug currently spends his times consulting and training organizations. Doug blogs about search and other topics at http://softwaredoug.com

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