I’m Chris — a software developer based in London. I’m currently Director of Engineering at Vimeo, leading the teams behind the platform that powers millions of videos. This is my personal blog, where I write about programming, search systems, and Elasticsearch.
xAI open-sourced the For You feed algorithm today. Three observations through a search-and-IR lens: two-tower’s quiet dominance, the retrieve/rank split surviving the bitter lesson, and recsys converging with search.
TurboQuant landed as a KV cache result, but the more interesting application might be ColBERT-style late interaction. Here’s the case, and the open questions.
A new quantisation method out of Google Research is making the rounds. Qdrant shipped it. Elastic ran the benchmarks and politely declined. Both responses tell you something useful.
DiskBBQ’s new filtered-search optimisation is the same architectural move I wrote about last week, applied one layer deeper. The pattern is fractal - and that’s what makes it useful.
Agentic search looks like a clean break from classical IR. Look closer and the architectural instincts are the ones backend engineers have used for decades - the components are new, the rules are not.
