Doug Turnbull's Blog

With algorithm development, naive solutions provide a crucial reference implementation for your testing.

Aliases, etc that have made rebase-based workflows in Git much less advanced feeling.

Experiments are to search relevance correctness as unit tests are to code correctness. By definition they're a broken but nescesarry defition of the problem we need to get started.

No need for local setup to play with Elasticsearch from a Jupyter notebook - just use Bonsai + Colab!

Let's explore this key bias in search systems towards the old algorithm and how to overcome it!

Analyzing the plausibility of guessing relevance judgments from runs in the VMWare Zero Shot Kaggle Competition

Can we simulate the likely search relevance labels just from knowing which results shifted and the outcome of an A/B test?

Work with amazing people you love collaborating with, the rest (mission, purpose, etc) falls out from that.

Reimplementing LambdaMART in Python for endless tinkering and learning

LambdaMART directly optimizes whatever search relevance ranking metric matters to your business. This article details how this neat machine learning trick works to target what matters most to your product

Contrasting how each language handles iteration helps understand how to work effectively in either.

In this article: we assume users review every search result. So we need to find that sweet spot when we get to look reaaalllly fricken smart and declare, with confidence, "we have nothing else that matches your query".

Using Pandas to compute Mean Reciprical Rank using the MSMarco Dataset

Judgment lists prevent search whack-a-mole. They provide a safety net for search, allowing you to innovate quickly on relevance with a high degree of confidence.

High end technical consulting is a fantastic thing for you to do mid career. It helps you build a personal brand, deepen soft skills, and focus on challenging technical problems. Why and why not you might want to take this step.

Twitter gives you an illusion of influence over political events. In reality, it meaninglessly fiddles our energy away. Doing our duty requires real work in the real world.

What I know so far on getting cheaper delivery in Charlottesville that avoids Grubhub's shenanigans and supports local restaurants

Add friction to your twitter login to keep yourself sane.

Write to grow closer to the truth. Not because you have all the answers, not to get page views or win internet points. Instead write to broach a point of view and test it against your audience's norms and points of view.