Max Irwin

Search engineer at Bonsai, focused on applying neural/BERT-based approaches to practical search relevance problems. Formerly at OpenSource Connections (OSC).

Known For

• Early practical analysis of BERT for Elasticsearch search relevance (2019)
• Bridging gap between NLP research and production search systems

Articles

• Understanding BERT and Search Relevance

• How to Really Design Search for a Database — Bonsai tutorial: design a single denormalized index around information needs, not the DB schema

• Search Koans — Bonsai; Zen-style kōans on the daily contradictions of search work (Fun and Philosophy)

• How to Really Do Autocomplete — Bonsai; Part 1, generating suggestion vocabulary from documents

• How to Really Scale Autocomplete — Bonsai; Part 2, scaling autocomplete to 6M docs at sub-50ms

Key Concepts

• Dense Vector Retrieval

• Bi-Encoder

• Cross-Encoder

• Embedding Fine-tuning

• Unified Search Index

• Denormalization for Search

Talks & Videos

• Max Irwin - The Search Engine Migration Circus — Haystack Live; search-engine migration playbook and war stories

Affiliations

• Bonsai — current employer; author on the Bonsai engineering blog (search-over-database, autocomplete, and Search Kōans)
• OpenSource Connections (OSC) — former employer, same org as Doug Turnbull