Blog

Articles about search engines, their algorithms, and running search closer to the reader.

• How Search Engines Work: inverted indexes, BM25, compression and top-K pruning.
• Mitigating Internet Censorship and Privacy Issues: the original browser-search idea, with current notes on its limitations.
• Dense Retrieval: from embeddings to candidate selection and exact scoring.
• Sparse Retrieval: from lexical scoring to learned expansion and approximate search.

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Table of contents

• How Search Engines Work
• Mitigating Internet Censorship and Privacy Issues
• Dense Retrieval — Embeddings, Candidates, and Exact Scores
• Sparse Retrieval — From BM25 to Learned Representations