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Tensors in the Search Engine (Why?)

Hosted by Radu Gheorge and Doug Turnbull (Maven)

Wed, Sep 23, 2026

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Cheat at Search with Agents
Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Tensor use-cases in retrieval

What are tensors? Where do they help in search? (and where they don't)

Vespa's Tensor Playground

Learn how to experiment with Vespa tensor expressions for fun and profit

Usage patterns for tensors

Tensors in practice: from multi-vector search to chunked documents to custom scoring functions.

Why this topic matters

RAG and Agentic search requires vector search. And increasingly multi-vector retrieval. Vespa's tensor feature implements vector search. "How are tensors better than vectors?" is a common follow-up question, but it sets the wrong frame. Instead, we'll look at how tensors work (in Vespa) and what kind of retrieval problems they help solve. Not every use-case needs it, but those who do, benefit. A lot.

You'll learn from

Radu Gheorge

Software Engineer, Vespa.ai

Radu has been in the search space for many years, mainly on Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, and, more recently, Vespa.ai. Helps users with both the relevance and the operations side of retrieval. Enjoys education in all its forms (training, blog posts, books, conferences...) and got the chance to be involved in all of them.

Doug Turnbull (Maven)

Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?

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