The Search Engineering Series
A nine-volume, Fowler-style pattern catalog for production search — from BM25 and dense retrieval to ranking, evaluation, operations, UX, platforms, and the LLM-augmented stack.
Nine volumes, one template
Every pattern follows the same Fowler template — Intent, Motivating Problem, How It Works, When to Use It, Sources — so the catalog reads as reference, not essay.
The Search Patterns Catalog
Query-time architectural patterns: lexical, dense, hybrid, multi-stage retrieve-and-rerank, routing, federation, caching.
Volume 02The Query Understanding Catalog
Turning raw queries into structured signals: tokenization, spell correction, parsing, intent, entities, rewriting, expansion.
Volume 03The Indexing and Document Engineering Catalog
The document side: analyzers, field design, enrichment, chunking, embedding strategies, incremental indexing.
Volume 04The Ranking and Relevance Catalog
The mathematics of ordering: BM25 variants, vector similarity, hybrid fusion, learning-to-rank, cross-encoders, calibration.
Volume 05The Search Evaluation Catalog
The measurement discipline: NDCG, MAP, MRR, judgment collection, online vs offline, A/B testing, regression detection.
Volume 06The Search Operations Catalog
The integrative practice: relevance tuning, query-log analysis, zero-result handling, judgment lists, running a search team.
Volume 07The Search UX Patterns Catalog
The user-facing surfaces: autocomplete, facets, result design, snippets, did-you-mean, zero-result UX, conversational search.
Volume 08The Search Platforms Survey
An honest survey of the major platforms: Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Algolia, Coveo, vector DBs, cloud search.
Volume 09The LLM-Augmented Search Catalog
The modern overlay: LLM-augmented query understanding, document enrichment, LLM-as-reranker, RAG with citation, evaluation.
Working on search relevance?
I help teams diagnose and improve production search — relevance tuning, evaluation harnesses, hybrid & LLM-augmented retrieval, and platform decisions.