Daniel Tunkelang

Principal engineer and search expert; author of the Query Understanding Substack. Previously at Google, LinkedIn, and other search-heavy companies.

Known For

• “Query Understanding” — the definitive practical blog on search
• Faceted search UX patterns
• Search diversity (Goldilocks problem, MMR)
• Search team management and culture

Articles

• Query Understanding - Relevance Feedback
• Evaluating Good Search - Measure It
• Measuring Searcher Behavior
• When There’s No Conversion Rate
• Searching for Goldilocks
• Thoughts on Search Result Diversity
• Facets - Constraints or Preferences
• Facets, But Which Ones
• Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries
• Affordances for Conversational Search
• Thoughts about Managing Search Teams
• Putting Search Ranking in Perspective

Referenced In

• Rene Kriegler - Query Relaxation — Kriegler’s word-embedding relaxation approach was prompted by a Tunkelang blog post on query relaxation

Key Concepts

• Search Evaluation
• Diversity Metrics
• Faceted Search
• Query Understanding
• Search Intent
• A-B Testing for Search
• Click Signals

On Jev

Posted a hands-on first impression of Jev within days of its launch: frontier-model quality at less than 1% of the cost, fast, and restricted to classification and regression — a constraint he states and then accepts rather than contests. See Reception of Jev.