Foundations of AI-Powered Search

Hosted by Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull

Mon, Nov 3, 2025

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour 15 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans and Agents

Doug Turnbull and Trey Grainger

View syllabus

Mon, Nov 3, 2025

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour 15 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans and Agents

Doug Turnbull and Trey Grainger

View syllabus

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

Offer a concrete and concise explanation of how you will help students understand and apply this lesson.

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

Trey is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search and is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations.

Trey is an instructor of Maven's AI-Powered Search course.

Doug Turnbull

Principal ML Engineer in Search

Doug Turnbull has led search teams since 2013. He worked on AI in e-commerce going as far back an 2022 at Shopify. Delivered the largest experimental wins on Reddit search, and now advises AI and search teams as they take on modern search challenges. He is co-author of the book AI-Powered Search and teaches on Maven with his Cheat at Search and AI-Powered Search courses.

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