Hybrid search Lessons learned

Designing hybrid search solutions requires decision-making. Not only is it a balancing act to find the right hardware resources but also choosing what to research when the team capacity is limited. In this talk we’ll explain designing a system that works for both RAG and conventional search use cases. We’ll zoom in on the re-usable nature of a nested index structure, how to build hybrid queries, how to control latency, how to tune relevance for an LLM, how to manage costs and other practical aspects that a search team has to deal with. This is also a story about rolling out a new way of information retrieval in an organization that has traditionally relied on keyword matching. Hybrid search doesn’t sell itself, needs to be explained and well prototyped. Join this session, learn about our lessons learned and walk away with practical strategies, real-world examples, and pitfalls to avoid when bringing hybrid search into production in enterprise environments.

Tom Burgmans

Wolters Kluwer

Tom is the Principal Product Software Engineer for the Search Team at Wolters Kluwer. Search has been the main theme through the last 20 years of Tom’s career, as webmaster (SEO techniques), as a post sales consultant for Autonomy (enterprise search implementations) and as a search engineer for Wolters Kluwer (optimizing search quality). In his current role Tom oversees the development and adoption of the Search Service that powers various large online research products.

Mohit Sidana

Wolters Kluwer

Mohit is the Search Architect for the Search Team at Wolters Kluwer, with over 9+ years of experience in roles such as Software developer and Search Relevance Engineer. He currently focuses on the architecture, development and adoption of the Search Service, which is the foundation for many online research products.