Doug Turnbull

An agent-coded search reranker An experiment guiding an agent to code a search reranker optimized for NDCG. How badly overfit is it?

I've been using agents for search rerankers, this was a lot of fun to work on

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

General purpose agentic loop in 40 lines of Python Drop in any well-typed Python function; the loop builds the tool schema and wiring for you. How I build dumb demos and experiments.

It doesn't take much to roll your own reusable agentic loop that uses just (annotated) Python functions as tools

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

I don't know what this means

EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in a 2022 interview warned supporters of reproductive rights that "one day it’s going to be your turn."

"Murder is murder. And one day it's going to be your turn."

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

Surprised by the last minute signups for Cheat at Search with LLMs -- starting at 12:30PM ET! Signup below:

maven.com/softwaredoug...

All the defenses of Jay Jones are whataboutiism (the GOP said similar bad thing, so we shouldn't hold Jones accountable). You either follow a moral principle or it’s meaningless.

Threats of political violence should be disqualifying.

Reasoning boosts search relevance 15-30% Kicking the tires on an initial, naive agentic search with some thoughts on how it could be improved further

I measured the impact of letting an agent drive a dumb BM25 search tool. It improves NDCG 15-30% above just BM25 in two datasets

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

Happy to announce I'll be a guest speaker during @softwaredoug.bsky.social's Cheat at Search course on Maven - join here maven.com/softwaredoug... - I'm speaking on October 16th

Same thing with pedestrian bridge by Stonefield. Or any number of patchwork projects

It's always the peak of absurdity when you see a nice, long stretch of protected bike path like 29N between Polo Grounds -- Hollymead. But that ultimately doesn't connect to anything. So it goes unused.

Nobody seems to plan these things from the perspective of getting bikes from A to B

That’s right, Son. Jesus walked everywhere.

You know who else went all week without driving? #weekwithoutdriving

Issue As part of its Homeless Intervention Plan, the City of Charlottesville, Virginia ("City"), has actively been seeking a facility to serve as a low-barrier shelter for those experiencing homelessness in our community. During the search, the City became aware of an opportunity to acquire the property located at 2000 Holiday Drive ("Property") in the City. Background / Rule The Property consists of two (2) contiguous land parcels totaling approximately 3.8 acres of land and a building with 27,000 gross square feet. The building has most recently been used as an office space accommodating over one-hundred (100) employees on site. There are sixty-nine (69) off-street parking spaces, as well as a number of street spaces on Holiday Drive. The site is also served by a transit stop 800'east at the intersection of Emmet Street and Holiday Drive. Given the building's current configuration, it will require renovation to be suitable for overnight shelter purposes. Initial review by City Staff indicates the building is sound and its configuration is conducive to conversion to an overnight/day shelter use. At this point, plans have not been developed, and costs are unknown at this time. The proposed Purchase Agreement provides a short study period until October 30 to more fully identify any issues that would significantly prevent transition to a shelter use. The City plans to engage with various nonprofit service providers regarding the operation of the facility and the local philanthropic community to seek assistance in funding the necessary renovations. City Staff proposes to use available funds from the CIP Contingency account to acquire the Property.

Some good news in the City Council packet for Monday’s meeting: the city is planning to purchase 2000 Holiday Drive to use as a low-barrier homelessness shelter.

More here: charlottesvilleva.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2511/f...

Ranking is overrated: why query understanding matters more Context depends on search that understands what users / agents want. That's why retrieval must go beyond ranking and towards understanding, to get the exact thing an agent or human wants! Search for ...

Yo pull over the car, new Tunkelang just dropped!

maven.com/p/0ab1e3/ran...

It's vector search Vern

This place is a pedestrian deathtrap

Shomir Wilson: American strength in AI depends on international students Gasps and murmurs are unusual at the opening session of an academic conference, but I heard many this summer in Vienna, Austria, at the annual meeting...

With support from my university's Office of Strategic Communications, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of international students to research at US universities. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it today. www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

Next 72 hours: Discount Code vectorsrock for 20% off my October course discussing LLMs and Agents to improve search relevance:

maven.com/softwaredoug...

I can recommend this for understanding lexical search and BM25! I'm pretty new to search in general, and had only used BM25, not really understood it. Now I understand what it does. 😁 Really cool when you're building a RAG pipeline.

Looking forward to the vector search talk!

Free course: Cheat at Search Essentials A free introductory search course for anyone who wants better search without all the hard work

Tomorrow I'll be talking about vector retrieval, continuing Cheat at Search Essentials. Full details on my blog article

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/07...

Agents turn simple keyword search into compelling search experiences Agents need tools they understand, like simple keyword search. They can reason about these tools, evaluate the results, refine, and iterate to deliver rather...

Agents will be a bigger paradigm shift than RAG for search

RAG is a lot of the same old search we've always built.

Agents that reason actually do quite well with simple search tools. They turn a dumb keyword search into something much smarter.

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

24 hours left to sign up for 20% off "Cheat at Search with LLMs"

maven.com/softwaredoug...

Cheat at Search Essentials: BM25 + Lexical It's often said with chat interfaces and RAG, search has become the hard problem. Search has a long history and means more than vector databases. Let's learn how BM25 and similar techniques compliment...

Recording for BM25 + Lexical Search now up

maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

This is a rare case of county having housing near biking access to the city. I wish that was a more common thing in the city-county boundary

Not sure if its a blind spot of the county or VDOT, but a lot of the "oh that's a hard area to get around" people talk about is at city-county boundary

Cheating at Query Understanding with LLMs 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 h...

This Wednesday I'll be discussing how to Cheat at Query Understanding using LLMs with Jason Liu. If you want a taste of "Cheat at Search with LLMs", please come hang out!

maven.com/p/eebe98

BM25F from scratch BM25 run across multiple fields isn’t as simple as summing a bunch of field-level BM25 scores.

BM25F is an adjustment to BM25 that accounts for multiple fields, beating out naive summing of BM25 scores

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Cheat at Search Essentials: BM25 + Lexical It's often said with chat interfaces and RAG, search has become the hard problem. Search has a long history and means more than vector databases. Let's learn how BM25 and similar techniques compliment...

Cheat at Search essentials begins Friday ! Lexical search from basic tokenization and term counts up to BM25F

maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

The scapegoats guide to organizational ‘transformation’ Leading a new effort at work meant to transform the company? May you last long enough to become the villain.

A scapegoat's guide to transforming organizations

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/09...

Yes, open carry is legal on Utah college campuses: Breaking down Utah gun law after Charlie Kirk shooting Utah is among the most permissive in the country with firearms, including on college campuses, says Clark Aposhian, the chair of the Utah Shooting Sports Council.

www.sltrib.com/news/educati...

Guns are bad.

Give the reigns of Dem power to the hands of working folks to lead the fight and get out of the way. Stop being run by fancy pants educated/wealthy liberals. Let the working class run the Dem party, including strategy, etc and get out of the way

Feels like that's the winning coalition