A Bag-of-Documents Model for Query Understanding & Retrieval

Daniel Tunkelang is an independent consultant specializing in search, information retrieval, and machine learning / AI, with a focus on query understanding, ranking, and large-scale retrieval systems. He was part of the founding team at Endeca and has held leadership roles in search at Google and LinkedIn. He has since advised organizations including Apple, Algolia, Canva, eBay, Etsy, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Zoom on search and discovery systems, helping them improve relevance and retrieval quality at scale. His work bridges classical information retrieval models and modern ML/AI approaches, with an emphasis on practical system design and evaluation.

Trey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections.

He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science focused on building self-learning search platforms integrating the most successful AI Search techniques.

TreyAI-Powered Sea

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?