There’s a lot of writing about search — especially about ranking and relevance. And recently there’s been an increased focus on the particular challenges of query understanding. But, surprisingly, there hasn’t been much discussion of content understanding. This post will be the first of many to address this gap. Content understanding is the foundation of the search process. Let’s…

This publication is a series of posts devoted to query understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them all, start with the first one.

Since Medium decided to allow AI-generated content as long as it’s clearly disclosed as such, I decided to give it a whirl. Prompt Engineering My first prompt was “Write a blog post about query understanding in the style of Daniel Tunkelang.” Unfortunately, the resulting post was blatantly self-promoting, with a lot of…

Searching for relevant results has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, most searchers have it easier than that, since haystacks don’t index their needs to make them more findable. Ironically, it sometimes feels like search applications throw needles into a haystack and then try to find…

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but-not-quite human, it triggers a negative response. We especially see this effect in animated films, such as The Polar Express. Or at least we used to…

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. Resume screening…

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…