History — 2026 week 20 (May 11 – May 17, 2026)
Newest first.
2026-05-17 — Consultancy, Tools & Niche Topics (~12 notes)
People — Charlie Hull (The Search Juggler, 25+ years in search).
Tools — Querqy (query rewriting library), Quepid (search relevance evaluation platform).
Companies — The Search Juggler.
Concepts — Signal Downboosting.
Topics — Understaffed Search Team, Search Consultancy, Events and Conferences, Fun and Philosophy, Books.
Articles — Your Obsidian Vault Is a Knowledge Graph, Getting Started on Search Relevance for the Understaffed Search Team.
2026-05-16 — Concepts, Companies & Topics Expansion (~49 notes)
Concepts — BERT, Reranking, TurboQuant, RaBitQ, Query Expansion, Collocations, Stopwords, Clicks Residual, MMR, APD, Linear Score Combination, Modality Gap, Contrastive Gap, Conversational Search, Knowledge Distillation, Dimensionality Reduction, Click Models, Query Sampling.
Companies — Qdrant, Netflix, Canva, Carousell, Etsy, Twitter, Spotify, OpenSource Connections, Skyscanner, Grubhub, Cohere.
Topics — A-B Testing for Search, Economics of Search, E-commerce Search, Autocomplete and Autosuggest, Synonyms and Vocabulary Management, Query Understanding in Practice, Managing a Search Team, Search Quality Assurance, Search Result Diversity, Hiring for Search.
People — Ivan Pleshkov, Jonas Schulz (Qdrant engineers), Neal Lathia (Skyscanner), Stuart Cam (Canva), Hassam Chundrigar (Daraz), Isabella Tromba (Slack), Mihajlo Grbovic (Airbnb), Sergey Feldman (AI2).
Articles — TurboQuant in Qdrant.
2026-05-15 — Initial Import (~200+ notes)
The founding batch. Core articles, concept definitions, MOCs, and key people were imported from the Awesome Search curated list.
Articles — full Query Understanding series (Query Understanding - Introduction through all sub-topics by Daniel Tunkelang), ranking articles (Multi-Stage Ranking, Compute Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) using Pandas), embedding articles (Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE), Fine-tuning Multimodal Embedding Models), and many more.
Concepts — foundational IR concepts: BM25, Reciprocal Rank Fusion, Hybrid Search, Synonyms, Bayesian BM25, Knowledge Graph Search, Query Understanding, Autocomplete, Faceted Search, Spelling Correction, Embeddings, Learning to Rank, NDCG, MRR, RAG, and many others.
MOCs — 6 Maps of Content created: MOC - Search UX and Discovery, MOC - Ranking and Retrieval, MOC - Agentic Search and Embeddings, MOC - Search Quality Assurance and Query Understanding, MOC - Architecture and Search Team.
People — Daniel Tunkelang, Doug Turnbull, James Rubinstein, Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade, Wolf Garbe, Eugene Yan, Piotr Mazurek, Karthik Ramasamy, Janani Narayanan, Thomas Veasey, Quynh Nguyen, David Albrecht, Max Irwin, Ted Underwood, and others.