Doug Turnbull
softwaredoug.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Doug Turnbull is a search engineer who writes about relevance, Elasticsearch, vector search, LLMs, and career topics for software engineers.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend his post on what AI engineers should know about search and cite his posts on high-dimensional orthogonality.
31HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
163stories submitted
2.7Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1What AI Engineers Should Know about Search4 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Staff engineers exist in a system of patronage3 people · 10 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 3Elasticsearch Hybrid Search in Practice3 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 4Turning my laptop into a Search Relevance Judge with local LLMs3 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5Ruby vs. Python comes down to the for loop2 people · 544 points · first shared 2021 · 302 comments on HN
- 6Are we at peak vector database?2 people · 236 points · first shared 2024 · 142 comments on HN
- 7Coping with dumb LLMs using classic ML2 people · 186 points · first shared 2025 · 78 comments on HN
- 8Dont have F-You money? Build an F-You Network2 people · 65 points · first shared 2024 · 4 comments on HN
- 9Why Write Code in 20262 people · 11 points · first shared 2026 · 2 comments on HN
- 10Your big company can't be a startup again2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 11Reasoning boosts search relevance 15-30%2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 12Do well-written, clear instructions beat few-shotting for tiny-LLMs?2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Can agents replace the search stack?2 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 14OpenAI lost the plot on 'boring' LLM use-cases2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15RRF Is Not Enough2 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
softwaredoug · 2022-08-25
This is a good opportunity to update my search reading list.
Books
* Lucene in Action - A bit out of date, but it has a lot of the core concepts of Lucene. 10 years ago, this was the go-to book even if you’re working with Solr or Elasticsearch, to understand the core data structures
* Relevant Search (my book) - Introduction to optimizing the relevance of full text search engines. Getting a bit old now, but still relevant for classic search engines.
* AI Powered Search (disclaimer - I contributed) - Author Trey Grainger is brilliant, and has been a long-time colleague of mine. He managed the search team at Careerbuilder (where we did some work together). This is in some ways his perspective on how machine learning and search work together.
* Elasticsearch The Definitive Guide - online free, very comprehensive, book from Elastic
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Blogs
* OpenSource Connections (my old company) Blog (http://o19s.com/blog) - lots of meaty search and relevance info
* Query Understanding (https://queryunderstanding.com/) - Daniel Tunkenlang is a long term very smart search person. Has worked at Google, etc
* James Rubenstein’s Blog (https://jamesrubinstein.medium.com/) - I worked closely with James at LexisNexis. He has helped work on search and search evaluation at Ebay, Pinterest, LexisNexis, and Apple
* Sematext (https://sematext.com/blog/) - Sematext are probably best known for being really in the weeds search engine engineers, a fair amount of scaling, etc. But some…
viraptor · 2025-02-17
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2022/12/26/surpries-at-hi-dimensions-ort… it's both much more likely to be actually orthogonal and almost always very close to orthogonal.
gavinhoward · 2023-09-11
I think it's supposed to direct you to this blog post: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2023/09/11/it-belongs-in-a-foundation .
wolfgarbe · 2024-07-26
Series of blog posts on search and information retrieval
https://medium.com/@dtunkelang
What AI Engineers Should Know about Search from Doug Turnbull
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/06/25/what-ai-engineers-need-to-kno…
Videos from Berlin Buzzwords
https://www.youtube.com/@PlainSchwarzUG/videos
Videos MIx-Camp E-commerce Search
https://www.youtube.com/@mix-campe-commercesearch2961/videos
Videos from OpenSource Connections / Haystack
https://www.youtube.com/@OpenSourceConnections/videos