Welcome

Thanks for purchasing the MEAP for AI-Powered Search!

This book teaches you the knowledge and skills you need to deliver highly-intelligent search applications that are able to automatically learn from every content update and user interaction, delivering continuously more relevant search results.

As you can imagine given that goal, this is not an “introduction to search” book. In order to get the most out of this book, you should ideally already be familiar with the core capabilities of modern search engines (inverted indices, relevance ranking, faceting, query parsing, text analysis, and so on) through experience with a technology like Apache Solr, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Vespa, or Apache Lucene. If you need to come up to speed quickly, Solr in Action (which I also wrote) provides you with all the search background necessary to dive head-first into AI-Powered Search.

Additionally, the code examples in this book are written in Python (and delivered in pre-configured Jupyter notebooks) to appeal both to engineers and data scientists. You don’t need to be an expert in Python, but you should have some programming experience to be able to read and understand the examples.