AMA with the Authors of AI-Powered Search
Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull • Location: Theater 5 • Back to Haystack 2025
“Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull, both authors of the recently-published AI-Powered Search book (https://aipoweredsearch.com), take the stage and attempt to answer your biggest questions about search, relevance, and the evolving landscape of AI search.
Have a tough question about dense vs. sparse vector search, quantization, semantic vs. lexical search vs. multimodal vs. hybrid search, personalized search and recommendations, bi-encoders vs. cross-encoders vs. LTR models, semantic knowledge graphs, semantic functions, late interaction models, or best practices for RAG, question answering, and interpreting query intent?
Ask questions to take advantage of the authors’ decades of experience helping many of the world’s top organizations solve complex search and relevance problems, or otherwise see if you can ““stump the chump”” with your craziest questions!”
Trey Grainger
SearchkernelTrey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and the founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science, including significant work developing semantic search, personalization and recommendation systems, and building self-learning search platforms leveraging content and behavior-based reflected intelligence.
Doug Turnbull
DaydreamDoug Turnbull is a consultant, coach, and trainer for search teams. He co-authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search. Doug loves learning from other search practitioners, and hopes you'll bring inquisitive curiosity and experiences to this talk. At fashion startup Daydream Doug's hybrid search solutions combining traditional search and CLIP embeddings led to a doubling of conversions. Doug's recent work on ML ranking at Reddit created a 2% increase in DAU, the largest seen in Reddit search history. Recently Doug worked at Shopify to help improve merchant search attributed revenue by 19% year over year. Doug blogs about search and other topics at http://softwaredoug.com