Join us for a meetup on Monday, March 14th at Appian in Reston, VA. 

At this meetup we will have an introduction from Appian then we will hear from our keynote speaker Doug Turnbull, author of Relevant Search. 

Let’s teach the old search engine new tricks! We can make it compare images, clump together at-risk students, and even predict the weather. In this talk, you’ll get an overview of search internals. But we’ll quickly switch to subverting search for our nefarious purposes. Our grand schemes will culminate with demos where the speaker embarrasses himself for your amusement to push search to new frontiers!

Doug Turnbull is a Search relevance consultant. Author of Relevant Search. Doug crafts search/recommendation solutions that “get” users. To do this, Doug uses Solr/Elasticsearch, sprinkling a little natural language processing and machine learning on top for good measure.

Doug makes a big difference for companies like O'Reilly Media and Advance Auto Parts. Doug's secret weapon is enabling non-technical product owners, business, and domain experts to take deeper control of their search. Through writing and speaking Doug wants to humanize search and recommendations, making these topic less intimidating for everyone: developers, non-technical folks, and users.

Doug loves building tools to help with search relevancy, including Quepid, Splainer and Elyzer.

Great conversation, food, and beverages will be provided!