Berlin Buzzwords
Berlin Buzzwords is an open-source conference on data storage, search, and scalability, held annually in Berlin. It has a strong search-engineering track and is one of the main European gathering points for the Lucene/Solr/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch community. The e-commerce-focused MICES conference is co-located with it.
Talks in this vault
- Hybrid search > sum of its parts? Berlin Buzzwords 2022 — Lester Solbakken benchmarking Hybrid Search (BM25 vs Dense Embeddings vs learned sparse) and fusion strategies including Reciprocal Rank Fusion.
- Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya - Relevance Feedback Inside the Search Engine — Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya (Qdrant), 2026; Relevance Feedback pushed into HNSW traversal instead of layered around the engine, with an argument against black-box search engines.
- Historical references from vault articles: MAXSCORE / WAND (Stefan Pohl, 2012), multi-stage retrieval and e-commerce search at scale (2019).
Related
- Events and Conferences — the broader conference landscape
- MICES — co-located e-commerce search conference
- Search Platforms · Hybrid Search