Trainings at Haystack Europe 2026
At Haystack Europe the Search and AI Experts at OpenSource Connections offer two training courses, which can be booked individually or as one full day training.
Training 1: Building Modern Search Platforms for Humans and AI
Search is no longer just a product feature — it’s becoming a foundational platform that powers AI assistants, copilots, personalization engines, and internal knowledge systems. Shifting from a solid onsite search experience to a true search platform raises new questions: how should teams collaborate, what data needs to be exposed and in what form, and how do you design for both human users and AI agents at once?
In this in-person, half-day training, we’ll start with the motivation, organizational context, and management perspective behind (re)platforming search, then move into concrete implementation topics — evaluation, agentic search design, business rules, and content enrichment for AI consumption.
Date: 14 September 2026
Time: 9:00-13:00
Price: 390,00 € (plus VAT)
This session is held in person as a half-day format, alongside our companion training, “LLMs as Judges for Search Result Quality”, on the same day.
Part 1 — Motivation, Context, and the Management Perspective
- Why (re)platform search now?
- Starting point: assessing your organization’s search maturity
- Data readiness as a key prerequisite for building modern search platforms, and what differs between a search application team and a platform team in terms of data ownership and transformations
- Team structures: applying Team Topologies to search platforms
- Platform for Search: the main components and specifics of a modern search platform, and the principles that make it accessible and suitable for AI
Part 2 — Towards an Implementation
- Evaluation: where it fits — “offline” vs. as part of retrieval — with a quick recap of LLM-as-Judge and other evaluation approaches
- Designing for agentic search: interfaces, requirements on retrieval, one Search API vs. exposing individual components, and the query understanding component
- The role of business rules and how to manage them
- Auto-research
- The data side: content enrichment and making content understandable to agents
This part includes hands-on exercises applying these ideas to real design decisions.
Who should attend this training?
- Platform and architecture leaders
- Engineering managers
- Product leaders working with AI and data-driven systems
This session is held in person as a half-day format, alongside our companion training, “LLMs as Judges for Search Result Quality”, on the same day.
Training 2: LLMs as Judges for Search Result Quality
Large Language Models (LLMs) transform how we build and evaluate search systems, it’s crucial to understand how to use them effectively as “judges.” This condensed, hands-on training introduces the principles and practical techniques for implementing “LLM as a Judge” to evaluate search result quality.
We’ll start with the fundamentals of search evaluation: How can search result quality be measured? How do LLM-based judgments differ from human ratings and behavioral signals? You’ll learn how to design evaluation frameworks, craft effective prompts, and define output structures that make LLM-based judgments robust, interpretable, and aligned with your goals. The session closes with a hands-on application exercise where you’ll put these techniques into practice.
Date: 14 September 2026
Time: 13:45-17:45
Price: 390,00 € (plus VAT)
This session is held in person as a half-day format, alongside our companion training, “Building Modern Search Platforms for Humans and AI”, on the same day.
The class will cover these areas:
- Introduction to search evaluation in the age of LLMs: how LLMs compare to human judgments and behavioral data for evaluation
- Designing LLM evaluation frameworks
- Pointwise vs. comparative (pairwise) judgments
- Evaluation of LLM judges
- Adding reasoning to LLM-based evaluation
- Context engineering: improving evaluation quality by adding contextual information
- Using critique models to improve evaluation quality
- Hands-on application session: applying LLM-as-judge techniques to a real evaluation task
Who should attend this training?
Suitable for everyone with beginner to intermediate expertise in search. The course gives a kickstart into using LLMs as Judges for search result quality in real-world applications.
The class will use Python Jupyter Notebooks for the hands-on lab. The code will be explained step-by-step. Some basic knowledge of Python will be beneficial.
Your Trainers
René Kriegler
René has worked in search for almost two decades, including on projects for some of the top 10 German e-commerce sites. He is co-founder and co-organiser of MICES (Mix-Camp E-commerce Search), an event that brings together the e-commerce search community each year. His technological focus is on OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and Lucene. He created and maintains the Querqy open source library for query rewriting.
As Chief Strategy Officer at OSC, René is focused on technical strategy and fulfilling the needs of our clients.
Doug Turnbull
In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he’s still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the overwhelming landscape first hand. Yet Doug still works to deeply understand the what / how / why. He help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.
He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years – all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?
Daniel Wrigley
Daniel has worked in search since graduating in computational linguistics studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2012 where he developed his weakness for search and natural language processing. His experience as a search consultant paved the way for becoming an O’Reilly author co-authoring the first German book on Apache Solr.
His current work focuses on leveraging AI agents to accelerate the next generation of search quality improvements.
In his free time he supports the local fire brigade as a volunteer firefighter and serves as the sports director of the local shooting club in the village he lives in.