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

Vector Podcast by Dmitry Kan

Episode notes

Topics:

00:00 Intro

01:30 Doug’s story in Search

04:55 How Quepid came about

10:57 Relevance as product at Shopify: challenge, process, tools, evaluation

15:36 Search abandonment in Ecommerce

21:30 Rigor in A/B testing

23:53 Turn user intent and content meaning into tokens, not words into tokens

32:11 Use case for vector search in Maps. What about search in other domains?

38:05 Expanding on dense approaches

40:52 Sparse, dense, hybrid anyone?

48:18 Role of HNSW, scalability and new vector databases vs Elasticsearch / Solr dense search

52:12 Doug’s advice to vector database makers

58:19 Learning to Rank: how to start, how to collect data with active learning, what are the ML methods and a mindset

1:12:10 Blending search and recommendation

1:16:08 Search engin ... 

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