Doug Turnbull - Staff Relevance Engineer, Shopify - Search as a constant experimentation cycle

This episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpua1Euc-B8Topics:00:00 Intro01:30 Doug’s story in Search04:55 How Quepid came about10:57 Relevance as product at Shopify: challenge, process, tools, evaluation15:36 Search abandonment in Ecommerce21:30 Rigor in A/B testing23:53 Turn user intent and content meaning into tokens, not words into tokens32:11 Use case for vector search in Maps. What about search in other domains?38:05 Expanding on dense approaches40:52 Sparse, dense, hybrid anyone?48:18 Role of HNSW, scalability and new vector databases vs Elasticsearch / Solr dense search52:12 Doug’s advice to vector database makers58:19 Learning to Rank: how to start, how to collect data with active learning, what are the ML methods and a mindset1:12:10 Blending search and recommendation1:16:08 Search engineer role and key ingredients of managing search projects today1:20:34 What does a Product Manager do on a Search team?1:26:50 The magical question of WHY1:29:08 Doug’s announcementsShow notes:Doug’s course: https://www.getsphere.com/ml-engineering/ml-powered-search?source=Instructor-Other-070922-vector-podUpcoming book: https://www.manning.com/books/ai-powered-search?aaid=1&abid=e47ada24&chan=aipsDoug’s post in Shopify’s blog “Search at Shopify—Range in Data and Engineering is the Future”: https://shopify.engineering/search-at-shopifyDoug’s own blog: https://softwaredoug.com/Using Bayesian optimization for Elasticsearch relevance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDcYi-ANJwE&t=1sHello LTR: https://github.com/o19s/hello-ltrVector Databases: https://towardsdatascience.com/milvus-pinecone-vespa-weaviate-vald-gsi-what-unites-these-buzz-words-and-what-makes-each-9c65a3bd0696Research: Search abandonment has a lasting impact on brand loyalty: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/retail/search-abandonment-impacts-retail-sales-brand-loyaltyQuepid: https://quepid.com/Podcast design: Saurabh Rai [https://twitter.com/srvbhr]