Author | Lightnews

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 12h

Let me know if you want to grab coffee to chat at some point.

LLM Judges aren’t the shortcut you think

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 14h

Like an e-commerce company might enumerate all their categories, subcategories, etc of the "things" you can find (Vehicle -> Car -> Miata), and try to classify their products -- and users queries -- to those categorize. LLMs can be great at that.

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 14h

Yeah I would say what you describe is most of my work these days :)

"Synonyms" can mean many things. It's sometimes more precise to say alternate terms (like USA vs United States of America), vs hypernyms (parent concepts car -> vehicle), and hyponyms (more specific concepts, car -> miata)

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 16h

LLMs are not a good tool for labeling. They're a tool for feature engineering.

(Use Traditional ML w/ LLM features for the labeling)

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/11...

After the LLM judge hype curve crashes, what will come after?

Beyond chunks - how to actually data model for RAG

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 4d

Lightning Lessons on The march to Cheat at Search with *Agents* coming in Feb -- Coming Nov 17, Radu Gheorghe of Vespa.ai will share best practices on RAG chunking. Or really beyond RAG chunking :)

maven.com/p/e2a6af/bey...

In enterprise and web search, many questions are answered by separate bits of documents, yet semantics and properties of the containing entity are also important. While there's no silver bullet - beca...

AI-Powered Search (the Course!): Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 7d

One week left for AI Powered Search!

aipoweredsearch.com/articles/ai-...

AI-Powered Search authors Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull are excited to offer an immersive virtual course...

aipoweredsearch.com

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 14d

I've been using agents for search rerankers, this was a lot of fun to work on

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

An agent-coded search reranker

An experiment guiding an agent to code a search reranker optimized for NDCG. How badly overfit is it?

General purpose agentic loop in 40 lines of Python

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 18d

It doesn't take much to roll your own reusable agentic loop that uses just (annotated) Python functions as tools

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

Drop in any well-typed Python function; the loop builds the tool schema and wiring for you. How I build dumb demos and experiments.

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 24d

I don't know what this means

Reposted by Doug Turnbull

MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 26d

EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in a 2022 interview warned supporters of reproductive rights that "one day it’s going to be your turn."

"Murder is murder. And one day it's going to be your turn."

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 26d

Surprised by the last minute signups for Cheat at Search with LLMs -- starting at 12:30PM ET! Signup below:

maven.com/softwaredoug...

Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

Reasoning boosts search relevance 15-30%

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 27d

All the defenses of Jay Jones are whataboutiism (the GOP said similar bad thing, so we shouldn't hold Jones accountable). You either follow a moral principle or it’s meaningless.

Threats of political violence should be disqualifying.

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 28d

I measured the impact of letting an agent drive a dumb BM25 search tool. It improves NDCG 15-30% above just BM25 in two datasets

softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10...

Kicking the tires on an initial, naive agentic search with some thoughts on how it could be improved further

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven

Reposted by Doug Turnbull

Charlie Hull @thesearchjuggler.bsky.social · Oct 1

Happy to announce I'll be a guest speaker during @softwaredoug.bsky.social's Cheat at Search course on Maven - join here maven.com/softwaredoug... - I'm speaking on October 16th

Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 28d

Same thing with pedestrian bridge by Stonefield. Or any number of patchwork projects

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · 28d

It's always the peak of absurdity when you see a nice, long stretch of protected bike path like 29N between Polo Grounds -- Hollymead. But that ultimately doesn't connect to anything. So it goes unused.

Nobody seems to plan these things from the perspective of getting bikes from A to B

Ranking is overrated: why query understanding matters more

Reposted by Doug Turnbull

Josh Skelekrahn @joshkrahn.bsky.social · Oct 4

You know who else went all week without driving? #weekwithoutdriving

That’s right, Son. Jesus walked everywhere.

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Reposted by Doug Turnbull

Livable Cville @livablecville.bsky.social · Oct 2

Some good news in the City Council packet for Monday’s meeting: the city is planning to purchase 2000 Holiday Drive to use as a low-barrier homelessness shelter.

More here: charlottesvilleva.portal.civicclerk.com/event/2511/f...

Issue
As part of its Homeless Intervention Plan, the City of Charlottesville, Virginia ("City"), has actively been seeking a facility to serve as a low-barrier shelter for those experiencing homelessness in our community. During the search, the City became aware of an opportunity to acquire the property located at 2000 Holiday Drive ("Property") in the City.
Background / Rule
The Property consists of two (2) contiguous land parcels totaling approximately 3.8 acres of land and a building with 27,000 gross square feet. The building has most recently been used as an office space accommodating over one-hundred (100) employees on site. There are sixty-nine (69) off-street parking spaces, as well as a number of street spaces on Holiday Drive.
The site is also served by a
transit stop 800'east at the intersection of Emmet Street and Holiday Drive.
Given the building's current configuration, it will require renovation to be suitable for overnight shelter purposes. Initial review by City Staff indicates the building is sound and its configuration is conducive to conversion to an overnight/day shelter use.
At this point, plans have not been developed, and costs are unknown at this time. The proposed Purchase Agreement provides a short study period until October 30 to more fully identify any issues that would significantly prevent transition to a shelter use. The City plans to engage with various nonprofit service providers regarding the operation of the facility and the local philanthropic community to seek assistance in funding the necessary renovations.
City Staff proposes to use available funds from the CIP Contingency account to acquire the Property.

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · Oct 1

Yo pull over the car, new Tunkelang just dropped!

maven.com/p/0ab1e3/ran...

Context depends on search that understands what users / agents want. That's why retrieval must go beyond ranking and towards understanding, to get the exact thing an agent or human wants! Search for ...

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · Sep 26

It's vector search Vern

Shomir Wilson: American strength in AI depends on international students

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · Sep 26

This place is a pedestrian deathtrap

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Reposted by Doug Turnbull

Shomir Wilson @shomir.bsky.social · Sep 25

With support from my university's Office of Strategic Communications, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of international students to research at US universities. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it today. www.post-gazette.com/opinion/gues...

Gasps and murmurs are unusual at the opening session of an academic conference, but I heard many this summer in Vienna, Austria, at the annual meeting...

www.post-gazette.com

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Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · Sep 25

Next 72 hours: Discount Code vectorsrock for 20% off my October course discussing LLMs and Agents to improve search relevance:

maven.com/softwaredoug...

Cheat at Search with LLMs by Doug Turnbull on Maven

Learn to build LLM based query + content understanding in search

Cheat at Search Essentials: BM25 + Lexical

Reposted by Doug Turnbull

Markus 🤓✨ @markus.maragu.dev · Sep 24

I can recommend this for understanding lexical search and BM25! I'm pretty new to search in general, and had only used BM25, not really understood it. Now I understand what it does. 😁 Really cool when you're building a RAG pipeline.

Looking forward to the vector search talk!

Doug Turnbull @softwaredoug.bsky.social · Sep 22

Recording for BM25 + Lexical Search now up

maven.com/p/e9fbe4/che...

It's often said with chat interfaces and RAG, search has become the hard problem. Search has a long history and means more than vector databases. Let's learn how BM25 and similar techniques compliment...