Free Lesson
Foundations of AI-Powered Search
75 min
Nov 3, 2025 12:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
Sparse Vector Spaces and Lexical Search
How does keyword matching work with an inverted index (in contrast with embeddings), and what is a sparse vector space?
Dense Vector Spaces and Semantic Search
How does search over embeddings work with flat/ANN indexes? What are the many kinds of dense vector spaces that exist?
Vector Similarity, TF-IDF / BM25, and relevance ranking
How do we score how "relevant" documents are for a given query? We'll cover cosine similarity and TF-IDF / BM25 scoring.
An overview of contemporary and emerging AI Search methods
We'll summarize the more advanced AI Search methods we'll be teaching in the full AI-Powered Search course
Final chance to enroll in AI-Powered Search course
This is last day to enroll in "AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents". Ask final questions + join us!
Why this topic matters
Before Doug & Trey kick off their comprehensive "AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans and Agents" course on Nov 4, they're holding this free "Foundations" session to cover introductory AI-Powered Search concepts and answer any final questions from prospective students. All are welcome to join, and then we'll kick off with enrolled students in the full course starting the following day.
You'll learn from
Trey Grainger
Author, "AI-Powered Search", Founder @ Searchkernel
Doug Turnbull
Principal ML Engineer in Search
Built Search At
