Search isn’t working? Let me help.
If you’re struggling to provide relevant search results for your users, would like to take advantage of new AI-powered search techniques, have a search service or product that you would like to bring to market or promote more effectively, want to run a great event focused on search & AI or just need expert search consulting, talk to me.
About me
With my unique approach, I can transform your search strategy.
I am a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint; I have held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. I am deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies. My past experience in software engineering gives me a highly informed perspective on search technology with a particular focus on open source platforms such as Lucene, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. More recently I have helped several companies use modern AI techniques to supercharge search.
Read my story and contact me today to find out how I can help.
How I can help
With 25 years of experience in search, working with organisations across the world from startups to members of the Fortune 500, I am uniquely positioned to advise you. If I can’t help on my own, I can use my deep and wide personal network to find the people you need. If you can’t see what you need below, get in touch to discuss your requirements – I’m always happy to chat about search & AI!
Search Strategy Audit
Struggling to provide great results to your users?
Working with your team either remotely or in person, I will analyze your strategic approach to search & AI and provide specific and targeted recommendations to drive your business forward. I’ll identify blindspots, suggest better processes and patterns, show you how to build a great search team and discuss how you can measure search relevance.
Search Consulting
Need help from an experienced search expert?
I am also available for hourly or daily consulting on all aspects of search & AI. I can train you on search fundamentals, help you develop processes to measure and continually improve search relevance, advise on technology choice, assist you as you create, build and upskill your search team and work with all levels of your business from engineering to executive.
Market Positioning
Want to promote your search & AI product or service?
Using my deep and long experience of the search sector, I will help you understand the world of search & AI, review your products, position your offerings for best traction, communicate your value and raise your profile. I’ll show you which events to attend and how to actively participate in the search community.
Event Expert
Planning a conference or event about search & AI?
As a well-known figure in the search community, an experienced and popular conference speaker and the organiser and host of many events including Haystack, I can help you create and run events to inform, educate and inspire. I’m also available as a keynote or track speaker – watch some of my past talks and check out my search conference calendar.
Watch my conference talks & podcasts
I’m an experienced conference speaker and host and I’m regularly interviewed on industry podcasts. Watch some of my past talks below and if you’d like me to speak at your event, join a panel or feature on a podcast, get in touch. In 2025 I hope to attend events including Elasticon London, OpenSearchCon, Berlin Buzzwords and Haystack – let me know if you’d like to meet up!
Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid
Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval.
The objective of the conference this year is …to explore the implications and opportunities of AI-based technologies in enhancing the user experience in enterprise, e-commerce and systematic search.
The conference marks the first anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022.Show More
Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid
Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s …
Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval.
The objective of the conference this year is …to explore the implications and opportunities of AI-based technologies in enhancing the user experience in enterprise, e-commerce and systematic search.
The conference marks the first anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022.Show More
Retrieve, Augment, Generate then Measure – How to Build Open Source AI | Charlie Hull
Go Beyond Search with Generative AI – Erik Schwartz & Charlie Hull – 3rd January 2024
Turn your videos into live streams with Restream …
Turn your videos into live streams with Restream https://restre.am/ANIm
Everyone expects a really good search experience – and frankly it is table stakes. Generative AI brings new opportunities to …go beyond and solve some old problems in new, really clever ways.
Join Charlie and Erik Live in what promises to be an fascinating conversation!Show More
Ranking panel: Finding out what's best – Etienne Martin, Daniel Tunkelang, Eric Pugh & Charlie Hull
Search is about always returning the best results, but how do you find …
Search is about always returning the best results, but how do you find “best”? Join a panel of industry experts as we discuss strategies for search ranking and relevance (and …why they’re not interchangeable).
This video was recorded during Algolia DevCon on October 2nd, 2024.
It was hosted by Chuck Meyer, Staff Developer Advocate at Algolia. The panelists were:
– Etienne Martin, VP Product at Algolia
– Daniel Tunkelang, Search and Machine Learning Expert
– Eric Pugh, Co-founder and CEO at OpenSource Connections
– Charlie Hull, Director at OpenSource Connections
Learn more about Algolia on https://algolia.com/developersShow More
Data-driven Search Optimization, Analysing Relevance, From Queries to Metrics
In this episode, we talk data-driven search optimizations with Charlie …
In this episode, we talk data-driven search optimizations with Charlie Hull.
Charlie is a search expert from Open Source Connections. He has built Flax, one of the leading open source …search companies in the UK, has written “Searching the Enterprise”, and is one of the main voices on data-driven search.
We discuss strategies to improve search systems quantitatively and much more.
Key Points:
1. Relevance in search is subjective and context-dependent, making it challenging to measure consistently.
2. Common mistakes in assessing search systems include overemphasizing processing speed and relying solely on user complaints.
3. Three main methods to measure search system performance:
– Human evaluation
– User interaction data analysis
– AI-assisted judgment (with caution)
4. Importance of balancing business objectives with user needs when optimizing search results.
5. Technical components for assessing search systems:
– Query logs analysis
– Source data quality examination
– Test queries and cases setup
**Resources mentioned:**
– [Quepid](https://quepid.com/): Open-source tool for search quality testing
– [Haystack conference](https://haystackconf.com/): Upcoming event in Berlin (September 30 – October 1)
– [Relevance Slack community](https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2021/07/06/building-the-search-community-with-relevance-slack/)
– [OpenSource Connections](https://www.o19s.com/)
**Charlie Hull:**
– [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliehullsearch/)
– [X (Twitter)](https://x.com/FlaxSearch)
**Nicolay Gerold:**
– [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolay-gerold/)
– [X (Twitter)](https://twitter.com/nicolaygerold)
search results, search systems, assessing, evaluation, improvement, data quality, user behavior, proactive, test dataset, search engine optimization, SEO, search quality, metadata, query classification, user intent, search results, metrics, business objectives, user objectives, experimentation, continuous improvement, data modeling, embeddings, machine learning, information retrieval
00:00 Introduction
01:35 Challenges in Measuring Search Relevance
02:19 Common Mistakes in Search System Assessment
03:22 Methods to Measure Search System Performance
04:28 Human Evaluation in Search Systems
05:18 Leveraging User Interaction Data
06:04 Implementing AI for Search Evaluation
09:14 Technical Components for Assessing Search Systems
12:07 Improving Search Quality Through Data Analysis
17:16 Proactive Search System Monitoring
24:26 Balancing Business and User Objectives in Search
25:08 Search Metrics and KPIs: A Contract Between Teams
26:56 The Role of Recency and Popularity in Search Algorithms
28:56 Experimentation: The Key to Optimizing Search
30:57 Offline Search Labs and A/B Testing
34:05 Simple Levers to Improve Search
37:38 Data Modeling and Its Importance in Search
43:29 Combining Keyword and Vector Search
44:24 Bridging the Gap Between Machine Learning and Information Retrieval
47:13 Closing Remarks and Contact InformationShow More
User behavior insights – Charlie Hull, Stavros Macrakis – MICES 2024
Every e-commerce search professional needs data about users’ behavior. …
Every e-commerce search professional needs data about users’ behavior. Data is fundamental for analyzing user behavior and improving search relevance, both with manual tuning and with machine learning. The User …Behavior Insights system provides a standard way to do that. Until now, collecting fine-grained user behavior data has been haphazard. Many search developers have developed their own ad hoc data collection systems and analysis tools. Proprietary systems collect data but mostly track page-to-page flow, and not granular data on the flow of search results through the system, mostly sharing aggregations with their customers. And open-source systems generally don’t offer data collection mechanisms. Our open-source User Behavior Insights (UBI) system provides a client-side library for instrumenting web pages, server-side tools for collecting data, and analytical tools for understanding it. Critically, it defines a standard schema for behavior data so that the community can contribute additional analytical tools. We will share a call to action to the e-commerce search community on the need to make it simpler to seamlessly track, the steps of a user’s search journey in an ethical and safe manner in order to build the experiences of the future.
Stavros is passionate about search relevance. At AWS, Google, GLG, FAST, and Lycos, he has worked with a wide variety of organizations and applications, and is frequently astounded at how even large, sophisticated organizations fail to collect the data needed to evaluate and tune their search systems.
Charlie Hull is the Marketing Director at OSC and also leads client projects. He keeps a strategic view on developments in the search industry and is in demand as a speaker at conferences across the world.Show More
Charlie Hull – Tune E-commerce Search For Success with Chorus & OpenSearch
Chorus, the open source reference platform for e-commerce search, …
Chorus, the open source reference platform for e-commerce search, shows you how to build measurable and tunable applications that delight users and drive conversions. Now available for OpenSearch, this platform …lets you measure search quality and fix problematic queries on production in minutes.
E-commerce search managers are constantly tuning search, finding under-performing or problem queries and balancing changing business and user needs. Chorus, an entirely open source reference platform for e-commerce (now compatible with OpenSearch), allows you to test queries, gather human judgements and derive overall search result quality metrics. It also allows individual queries to be modified to boost up or down products from certain categories, help match what the user types with your product catalogue or redirect to information pages. Chorus is a composable reference implementation- you can take each of the technologies demonstrated and use them with your own OpenSearch setup as you require.
We’ll show how Chorus came to be and demonstrate using our example online shop, Chorus Electronics, how to fix common problems that affect user loyalty and sales volume. We’ll also discuss how Chorus can empower search managers to fix problem queries without re-indexing or modifying search configurations – even on a live site. We’ll finish with examples of how vector search can be used in Chorus to improve results and add image search.
Speaker:
Charlie Hull – https://opensearch.org/community/members/charlie-hull.html
More: https://opensearch.org/events/opensearchcon/sessions/tune-e-commerce-search-for-success-with-chorus-and-opensearch.html
OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite used by developers to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data.
Learn more at:
Website: https://opensearch.org
Forum: https://forum.opensearch.org
GitHub: https://github.com/opensearch-project/
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/opensearch-project/Show More
Berlin Buzzwords 2023: The Debate Returns (with more vectors): Which Search Engine?
What’s best for a particular use case? What advantages does one …
Building the best ecommerce search with open source software – Charlie Hull
Effective search is a vital component of ecommerce websites that are …
Effective search is a vital component of ecommerce websites that are experiencing huge rises in usage as the world shifts to online shopping, accelerated by the current pandemic. However, many …commercial and open source ecommerce platforms offer a poor search experience for the customer and fail to provide the right tools or support for marketers and others attempting to improve search quality and thus online sales.
Charlie will first show some simple tools to assess common failings of ecommerce search and their possible causes. He will then introduce Chorus, a reference implementation combining various open source projects that allows ecommerce providers to build their own high-quality search engine that can easily be measured, rated, tuned and tested. He’ll then demonstrate some simple search relevance measurement and tuning operations using an example web shop.Show More
Haystack US 2024 – Charlie Hull: Introduction & Welcome, The People of Search
Charlie Hull of OpenSource Connections welcomes you to Haystack US …
Charlie Hull of OpenSource Connections welcomes you to Haystack US 2024! Featuring a short talk on the people of search – the giants on whose shoulders we stand, the people …of today and the people we’ve lost. He also announces the winners of the Hughes Scholarship and the 5000th member of Relevance Slack!
Haystack US 2024 brought to you by OpenSource Connections, Experts in Search & AI, offering consulting, training and specialist staffing – talk to us about your search & AI project at https://www.opensourceconnections.comShow More
Unconference Talk: Charlie Hull & Eric Pugh – We need better docs!
We all tend to add “Elastic” to the end of our queries for Docs! Plus …
Haystack On Tour, Kraków Feb 2023 – Charlie Hull asks: Why is search still so hard to get right?
Why is search still so hard to get right? Charlie Hull of OpenSource …
Why is search still so hard to get right? Charlie Hull of OpenSource Connections introduces the Haystack On Tour event with some possible reasons:
– I don’t speak your language
– I …don’t know what you want
– I don’t know how good my search is
– Everybody hates my search engine
– Too many choices!
– It’s a wicked problemShow More
05
“Charlie knows search and relevance…a unique perspective on search in all kinds of business domains and contexts.”
“…one of the most skilled professionals I’ve encountered in the field of information retrieval.”
“a knack for understanding the real requirements (both technical and organizational) and finding solutions for them.”
“..able to explain the parts I had been missing about techniques like RAG, and why to concentrate at least as much on the search part as the LLM, if not more so.”
From LinkedIn
Blog
Read my blogs from 2019-2024 here and earlier blogs here – get the latest and greatest below!
AIExperts use Advanced Search to zero in on exactly what they need – do AI Agents need to do the same and how can we enabl…
AIJoin me at a new Search & AI Meetup in London this April 3rd – featuring amazing talks from leading voices in search & A…
AII recently wrote about a way to make Quepid, the relevance testing tool, work with pretty much any website. I did this b…
Open SourceIf you know your search is broken (often because lots of users and colleagues are complaining about it) the first step i…
AIWe still don't know what we mean by open source AI, but many are playing fast and loose with the term to disrupt the AI …
AICan AI help us build better enterprise search? The AI giants are coming – can they understand the people problems we nee…
Solr Consulting, Elasticsearch Consulting, OpenSearch Consulting, Vespa Consulting, Vector Search Consulting, RAG Consulting, AI-powered search, e-commerce search, ecommerce search, Lucene Consulting, enterprise search consulting, website search consulting, relevance engineering, search relevance consulting, retrieval augmented generation consulting
