Hi my name is Doug Turnbull and I love chatting with new friends in search and adjacent spaces

Why?

I love comparing notes with my colleagues, learning, and making new friends.

I have long been a consultant and still enjoy advising and getting to know teams. And it helps me get a breadth of perspectives and ideas in the industry. So I’m happy to do it once a week for free.

I’ve been doing some version of this for years, I find it’s a fantastic practice for broadening your horizons!

Who am I?

Through my years in search I co-wrote Relevant Search (2016) and AI Powered Search (2024). I created Elasticsearch Learning to Rank (2017), co-founded Haystack and have worked on search at places like Wikipedia, Shopify, Reddit and more.

I’ve had dozens of experiences around the industry and am always humbled by the speed of change in the search team. So there is always something new to learn about.

My happy place is training, sharing, and making connections in the community.

Who are you?

You’re maybe a senior-staff-principal dev, or you’re entire team, team leader that wants to compare notes on a tough problem

You’re an old or soon-to-be friend that wants to tell funny stories or gripe about the industry

You’re a junior getting started in the etc on a search/RAG/Information Retrieval space and want to know how to grow your career

I’m excited to meet you!

What do I like to chat about

• Improving search quality (manual relevance, machine learning, learning to rank, AI)
• Recruiting, hiring, interviewing, and team building in search and AI
• Vector search - adding embeddings to a mature search system
• Hybrid search - best of both lexical and vector. How to use them together?
• Adding an LLM to your search system
• Building RAG applications
• Improving measurement of search relevance (clickstream, human labels, LLM as a judge)
• Socialize, share stories, belly ache, talk about our mutual love for dogs, places we’ve traveled, etc

Format

Usually via an unprepared, casual conversation 30 mins

Would you ever do anything paid?

Rarely. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.

When?

Fridays. 30 mins. I do one a week. Don’t hesitate to email

How?

• Just schedule on Calendly - just add a one sentence topic
• Or email with any unique inquiries