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. 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, OpenSearch & Vespa. More recently I have helped several companies use traditional & modern AI techniques to supercharge search – here’s some recommendations from the team at Moonpig who I helped in 2025.
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 Engine 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 2026 I hope to attend events including Elasticon London, OpenSearchCon, Berlin Buzzwords and Haystack – let me know if you’d like to meet up!
How much searchandizing is too much searchandizing? – Charlie Hull – MICES 2026
You’ve installed a new search engine with powerful matching and ranking features — and now your executives, commercial team and users are complaining that certain products don’t appear, suppliers are …demanding top placement, and common misspellings lead to zero results. Searchandizing to the rescue! You start adding rules, redirects, query rewrites, synonyms and hacks…. Months or years later, the original search logic is buried beneath so many special cases that you’re not sure anymore why anything appears where it does. Maybe you’ve gone too far.
This talk covers when searchandizing should — and should not — be used, which techniques to apply, and how to make results explainable both internally and externally. It will describe processes and good practices to manage searchandizing proactively rather than reactively, how to prioritise, how to push back when nothing should change, and why ongoing maintenance and the ability to review and remove old rules matters.
Charlie is a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint. He has held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. He is deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies and open source stacks.
MICES – MIx-Camp E-commerce Search https://mices.coShow More
How much searchandizing is too much searchandizing? – Charlie Hull – MICES 2026
You’ve installed a new search engine with powerful matching and …
You’ve installed a new search engine with powerful matching and ranking features — and now your executives, commercial team and users are complaining that certain products don’t appear, suppliers are …demanding top placement, and common misspellings lead to zero results. Searchandizing to the rescue! You start adding rules, redirects, query rewrites, synonyms and hacks…. Months or years later, the original search logic is buried beneath so many special cases that you’re not sure anymore why anything appears where it does. Maybe you’ve gone too far.
This talk covers when searchandizing should — and should not — be used, which techniques to apply, and how to make results explainable both internally and externally. It will describe processes and good practices to manage searchandizing proactively rather than reactively, how to prioritise, how to push back when nothing should change, and why ongoing maintenance and the ability to review and remove old rules matters.
Charlie is a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint. He has held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. He is deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies and open source stacks.
MICES – MIx-Camp E-commerce Search https://mices.coShow More
AI is here – time to throw away our search engines? #bbuzz
More: …
More: https://2026.berlinbuzzwords.de/sessions/AI-is-here-time-to-throw-away-our-search-engines-
Speaker: Charlie Hull, Atita Arora, Jo Kristian Bergum, Dmitry Kan, Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya
Why do we even need traditional search when AI can do everything? Or is it foolish …to ignore simple, proven techniques for delivering great results? What’s the best way to combine old and new? Join our panel of experts for a fun and provocative debate!
AI has revolutionised the world of search – first by giving us better ways to understand language, rewrite content and provide single answers, and latterly with augmented coding techniques & AI agents to configure our engines & run our searches for us.
If you’re working on search applications today you’re probably looking at AI techniques first – but there’s decades of work behind the traditional search techniques that you can’t afford to ignore. Our panel, which includes leading experts on both old-school and new search techniques, will help you decide how to combine the best of both worlds.
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Follow us on Social Media and join the Community!
Mastodon: https://floss.social/@berlinbuzzwords
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/berlin-buzzwords
Website: https://berlinbuzzwords.de
Mail: info@berlinbuzzwords.de
Berlin Buzzwords is an event by Plain Schwarz – https://plainschwarz.comShow More
A neat trick with OpenSearch for protecting numbers when using fuzzy search – OpenSearchCon EU 26
Users will sometimes mistype queries, or simply get spelling wrong – …
Users will sometimes mistype queries, or simply get spelling wrong – check your query logs for examples. Did-you-mean spelling suggestion is one solution, or you can cope behind the scenes …with fuzzy search – this expands the query so more things match, using a Damerau-Levenshtein distance algorithm & transpositions. But what happens when you need to search for exact numbers? A talk from the Unconference at OpenSearchCon EU 2026 in Prague.Show More
Charlie Hull – Breaking Search For Fun and Profit #bbuzz
More: …
More: https://2025.berlinbuzzwords.de/sessions/Breaking-Search-For-Fun-and-Profit
Speaker: Charlie Hull
With a little experience it’s easy to find site search queries that don’t work. With live examples picked from a variety of high-profile websites, I’ll …show you how to easily break search – and discuss what we mean by ‘broken’, the different kinds of failure and what they reveal about the underlying search engine and how we might improve it.
Even the most sophisticated search system will fail in some cases – we simply can’t predict all the possible queries the user might try, what they are actually trying to achieve and how they might express their needs. Let’s try together to break search on a number of well-known websites – but not just for fun! There are different kinds of ‘broken’ – zero result searches, irrelevant results, system errors – we’ll describe each of these and show examples, creating a classification system for search failures. We’ll then talk about what underlying issues with search we might be able to reveal and how they could be fixed to improve overall search quality.
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Follow us on Social Media and join the Community!
Mastodon: https://floss.social/@BerlinBuzzwords
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/berlin-buzzwords
Website: https://berlinbuzzwords.de
Mail: info@berlinbuzzwords.de
Berlin Buzzwords is an event by Plain Schwarz – https://plainschwarz.comShow More
London Search & AI Meetup: Judgement Day: Rethinking Search Evaluation with Language Models – Tesco
11th November 2025 – Our first talk came from our hosts Tesco by Max …
11th November 2025 – Our first talk came from our hosts Tesco by Max Grogan (Data Scientist) and George Sykes (Senior Data Science Engineer): Judgement Day: Rethinking Search Evaluation with …Language Models
“Relevance labels are the backbone of evaluating search performance, yet human labelling is slow, costly, and hard to scale. This talk explores how LLMs can act as automated judges, producing scalable, human-like labels for ecommerce search. We’ll examine our learnings from trying to build such a system including building reliable evaluation datasets as well as the trade-offs of adopting different model and system architectures.”.Show More
Haystack EU 2025 Lightning Talk: Charlie Hull – 5 Easy Steps to Fix Your Search
Haystack is an event by OpenSource Connections. Website: …
London Search & AI Meetup: Putting taste at the heart of Depop's search: personalising at scale
From the London Search & AI Meetup on October 15th 2025 (join us at …
From the London Search & AI Meetup on October 15th 2025 (join us at http://www.thesearchjuggler.com/meetup):
“Search at Depop isn’t just about matching words — it’s about understanding taste. In this …talk, we’ll share how we reframed broad searches as a recommendation problem, using embeddings trained on user–item interactions to deliver highly personalised results. We’ll cover how Depop’s marketplace data powers these embeddings, how we integrated them into our search ranking pipeline, and the engineering challenges of deploying such a system at scale.”
Presented by Hamza Wahid and Allison Wong, including Q&AShow More
London Search & AI Meetup: Three things I’d do differently as a first-time Search Product Manager
From the London Search & AI Meetup on October 15th 2025 (join us at …
From the London Search & AI Meetup on October 15th 2025 (join us at http://www.thesearchjuggler.com/meetup):
“Search PM isn’t like any other PM role. In this talk, I’ll share three key …things I’d approach differently as a first-time Search PM, and how they changed the way I build products today.”
Presented by Olena Gorbatiuk.Show More
Haystack EU 2025: Fishbowl Forum: Live Search & AI Debate with Audience Takeover
With Charlie Hull, Trey Grainger, Shaun Brazendale, Aditya Varun …
Unconference Session: Test Search On Any Website With Quepid and Some Janky Javascri… Charlie Hall
Unconference Session: Test Search on Any Website with Quepid and Some …
Unconference Session: Test Search on Any Website with Quepid and Some Janky Javascript – Charlie Hall
London Search & AI Meetup 3rd April 2025 – Test Search on Any Website & Index State Management
Held at EPAM Systems on 3rd April 2025, our Search & AI Meetup …
Held at EPAM Systems on 3rd April 2025, our Search & AI Meetup featured two talks:
Talk 1 – Test Search on Any Website – Charlie Hull, The Search Juggler
I’ll show …you how to use the open source Quepid search relevance workbench to measure the search result quality for any website – using a combination of web scraping, janky Javascript parsing and a little luck. With this working, I’ll demo how you can manually rate results from test queries – or even get AI to do it for you – and derive metrics for quite how good (or bad) search is performing.
Charlie Hull is an expert search consultant with over 25 years experience helping companies build & tune amazing search applications. He was a Managing Consultant and part of the leadership team at OpenSource Connections, organised & hosted the Haystack conference for five years and is a well known blogger, author and speaker on search topics.
Talk 2 – Index State Management (ISM), an introduction – Nate Boot, OpenSearch Developer Advocate
We’ll learn about what the ISM plugin for OpenSearch can do, when it’s appropriate to use it, and some basic usages that will hopefully provide the spark you need to take good care of your data at scale.
Nate Boot: I’m a tech enthusiast overall, sometimes referred to as a “digital cheerleader”. My journey in technology began with my 1200 baud modem in the mid 80’s, where most of my formative years were spent in BBS teleconferences. I have since worked in a long line of devops roles, only three years ago transitioning to a Developer Advocate position where I could put programming ability together with public speaking. I recently celebrated my 8th year at Amazon. I love retro PC gaming, in particular the point and click adventures of the 80’s and 90’s. I love learning new things and sharing with anyone who will listen.
Supported by OpenSearch (www.opensearch.org), Eliatra (www.eliatra.com) and The Search Juggler (www.thesearchjuggler.com)
Offer a talk or venue for a future event at http://www.thesearchjuggler.com/helpmeetupShow 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
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“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.”
“I highly recommend Charlie to help with your search capability even if you think it’s in a good place he will know how to improve it.”
From LinkedIn
Blog
Read my blogs from 2019-2024 here , from pre-2019 here – get the latest and greatest below!
MarketAfter the recent Elastic layoff what should ex-Elasticians do and what does this mean for the search market – what are t…
AIIs everyone actually building agentic search? Or is it tomorrow's problem? My perspective from conferences and the real …
AII was chatting to people at a search conference recently and we got onto the subject of language and how it changes acco…
Open SourceFat fingers, cats on the keyboard and simply bad spelling – all of these can lead to search queries that don’t mat…
Open SourceHow Elasticsearch and OpenSearch work with externally created plugins – and how they could do better
EventsI love a Search Meetup! The chance to get together in an informal setting with others enthusiastic about search engine t…
More…
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
