I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the digital revolution that the web enabled. When social networking and media platforms came along, I was…

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Search is unquestionably my hammer, so it’s easy for me to frame everything as a search problem. After all, doesn’t a problem imply a search for a solution? But seriously, a lot of problems do look like search…

With apologies to Bruno, we don’t talk about resume screening. But we should. Resume screening is usually the first step in the hiring process for active candidates. After a candidate submits an application for a job posting, resume screening determines whether the application moves forward or abruptly terminates. …

Technical interviewing is hard, but that’s no excuse for it to be so terrible. Since candidates generally don’t have much leverage to negotiate the interview process, it’s incumbent on employers and hiring managers to improve the fairness, effectiveness, and efficiency of the interview process. If you’re involved in your organization’s…

I started writing about query understanding in 2016, working my way up from low-level concerns like language identification and character normalization to higher-level topics like query rewriting, contextual query understanding, and question answering. I hope folks have found it useful! But recently my all-consuming passion has been query similarity, as…

When we index content for search, it’s natural to think in terms of documents. But searchers aren’t necessarily looking for documents. They’re looking for information. That information may be a small part of a document or may be distributed across multiple documents. There’s no single approach to reliably extract all…

Many platforms, particularly social media sites and ecommerce marketplaces, establish policies to determine what they consider acceptable content. These platforms implement such policies through content moderation systems. Values and Tradeoffs The policy underlying a content moderation system reflects a particular set of values. When there are conflicts among those values, the policy provides…