The best way to build a horrible search product? Don’t ever measure anything against what a user wants.

Search veterans Doug Turnbull (Led Search at Reddit + Shopify; Wrote Relevant Search + AI Powered Search) and John Berryman (Early Engineer on Github Copilot; Author of Relevant Search + Prompt Engineering for LLMs), join Hugo to talk about how to build Agentic Search Applications.

We Discuss:

* The evolution of information retrieval as it moves from traditional keyword search toward “agentic search“ and what this means for builders.

* John’s five-level maturity model (you can prototype today!) for AI adoption, moving from Trad Search to conversational AI to asynchronous research assistants that reason about result quality.

* The Agentic Search Builders Playbook, including why and how you should “hand-roll” your own agentic loops to maintain control;

* The importance of “revealed preferences” that LLM-judges often miss (evaluations must use real clickstream data to capture “revealed preferences” that semantic relevance alone cannot infer)

* Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Agentic Search Applications

* Learning and teaching Search in the Age of Agents

You can find the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

You can also interact directly with the transcript here in NotebookLM: If you do so, let us know anything you find in the comments!

👉 Want to learn more about Building AI-Powered Software? Check out our Building AI Applications course. It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Here is a discount code for readers. 👈

Doug and Hugo are also doing a free lightning lesson on Feb 20 about How To Build Your First Agentic Search Application! You’ll walk away with a framework & code to build your first agentic search app. Register here to join live or get the recording after.

Links and Resources

Guests

* Arcturus Labs (John’s website)

* Software Doug (Doug’s website)

* John Berryman on LinkedIn

* Doug Turnbull on LinkedIn

Books

* Relevant Search by Doug Turnbull & John Berryman (Manning)

* AI-Powered Search by Doug Turnbull (Manning)

* Prompt Engineering for LLMs by John Berryman (O’Reilly)

Blog Posts

* Incremental AI Adoption for E-commerce by John Berryman

Episode 68: A Builder’s Guide to Agentic Search & Retrieval with Doug Turnbull & John Berryman