Doug Turnbull has spent his career making search quality a first-class concern for the software industry. Back in 2012, he saw that search relevance would be central to user experiences, yet the topic remained clouded in esoteric mystery. He set out to democratize the field through blogging and speaking, translating relevance engineering into ideas that working developers could actually apply to their own products.

In 2016, Doug’s book Relevant Search woke the industry up to the importance of search quality. He now works at Shopify, making great commerce search and discovery possible for everyone. Along the way, he co-created Elasticsearch Learning to Rank with the Wikimedia Foundation and contributed to Trey Grainger’s AI Powered Search, extending his relevance work into machine-learned ranking.

Doug continues to write and teach about search, retrieval, and data. You can find him at his website, where he blogs about search and data for practitioners who want their search boxes to actually work.