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Cheat at Search Essentials: Evaluation, NDCG, and pals

Part of Cheat at Search Essentials

60 min
May 14, 2026 12:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)

In this video

What you'll learn

Basics of retrieval evaluation

How the best search teams evaluate and measure search relevance

Where practice diverges from theory

When to ignore traditional search metrics and just trust your A/B tests. How to interpret offline metrics.

Pros / cons of different types of labeled relevance data

Do you use clicks? Human labels? LLM as a judge? What are the pros/cons of these approaches?

Why this topic matters

To get better at search, know the core metrics teams have historically used to evaluate search. See where they stop working, and what to do about them.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull

Ex-Reddit, Ex-Shopify. Author: AI Powered Search+Relevant Search

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