London Search Week

November 24-28, 2025

London Search Week

London hosts its first Search Technology Week.
Five days to learn, build, and benchmark next-gen search across the stack.

View schedule
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Scheduled Events

MON 24TH NOVEMBER

  • 2:00 – 5:00 PM We are Search Product Managers – BarCamp 

“We are Search Product Managers” is a growing international community of people who are working and interested in search product development. It was started by OpenSource Connections at the Haystack conference in the US earlier this year and has gained momentum during Haystack EU. We are very excited that this community will now grow and learn from each other in the UK.” – René Kriegler
Have you joined a search team as Product Manager, or are you already working as a Search Product Manager? Would you like to meet and chat with others facing the same challenges, share knowledge, tips and tricks and discuss the things that matter? This free participant-driven event where the topics are chosen by attendees is an opportunity to network, connect and build a community of Search Product Managers.
Hosted by Senior Search Product Manager Olena Gorbatiuk and Senior Search Consultant Charlie Hull.

Register
  • 6:00 – 9:00 PM London Information Retrieval & AI Meetup

A free evening event aimed at enthusiasts and professionals curious to explore and discuss the latest trends in the field. The event will be structured around 3 technical talks, each followed by a Q&A session, and will end with a networking session.

FIRST TALK
Using Tensor and Rank Profile Math to Combine Dense and Sparse Signals
Radu Gheorghe | Software Engineer @ Vespa.ai

From Infection Prevention to Knowledge Extraction: Showcasing Information Retrieval in the Medical Domain
Gregor Donabauer | PhD student and Research Officer @University of Regensburg

Professional Search in the Age of Large Language Models
Samy Ateia | PhD student @University of Regensburg + Freelance Software Engineer

Register on Meetup

TUE 25TH NOVEMBER

  • 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Search Solutions – Tutorial Day

Full-day tutorial

FIRST PART
Lexical, Dense and Sparse Vector Search with Vespa.ai
Radu Gheorghe | Software Engineer @ Vespa.ai

SECOND PART
Search Quality Evaluation in the Era of LLMs and Vector Search
Alessandro Benedetti | Director @ Sease

THIRD PART
What Does it Really Mean to Add GenAI to Open Source Enterprise Search?
Cédric Ulmer | CEO @France Labs

Get Tickets

WED 26TH NOVEMBER

  • 09:30 AM – 9:00 PM Search Solutions – Conference Day

Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for the presentation of the latest innovations in search and information retrieval.

Session 1: Evaluation
10:00am – Alessandro Benedetti (Sease) “Search Quality Evaluation in the Era of Large Language Models: Dataset Generator”
10:20am – Gianna Cipponeri “Evaluating Citation Quality and Context Faithfulness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Product-Specific Framework”
10:40am – Panel questions and answers

Session 2: Focus on the User
11:15am – Orland Hoeber (University of Regina) “Support Human Intelligence – An Alternative to Retrieval Augmented Generation in Academic Digital Library Search”
11:35am – Mark Harwood (Ex Elastic Developer) “Plasticine Not Porcelain: Shaping Embeddings Through Interactive Clustering”
11:55am – 5 Stephann Makri and Andrew MacFarlane (City St. George’s, University of London) “The Internet is Hard. Is Words”: Investigating Information Difficulties Experienced by People with Aphasia and Strategies for Combatting them”
12:15pm – Panel questions and answers

Session 3: Search Effectiveness
1:30pm – Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) “Re-Thinking Re-Ranking”
1:50pm – Cedric Ulmer (France Labs) “Adding GenAI to Datafari Community Edition – what and why”
2:10pm – Panel questions and answers

Session 4: Professional Search
2:45pm – Adam Roegiest (Zuva) “Information Retrieval Evaluation in the Real-World: A Legal Tech Perspective”
3:05pm – Jon Brassey (Trip Database) “Harnessing AI for Faster, Smarter Clinical Decision Support: The Evolution of Trip Database”
3:25pm – Marianne Lykke (Aalborg University) “Role of metadata and taxonomies in professional contexts”
3:45pm – Panel questions and answers

4:30pm – Panel session
5:15pm – BCS Search Industry Awards

6:00pm – AGM (free to attend)

Get Tickets

THU 27TH NOVEMBER

  • 6:00 – 09:00 PM Agentic AI Meetup – Search Has a New (Agentic) User: What Now?

This event is for AI builders, search practitioners , and product leaders who are now moving past “RAG 101” and exploring the new frontier of search. Join us to learn about the new patterns.

FIRST TALK
Humans vs Agents. The new era of Search
Olena Gorbatiuk | Search Product Manager

SECOND TALK
What the shift means for evaluating search
Lester Solbakken | co-founder Hornet.dev

THIRD PART
A No-BS panel

Drinks & debrief

Register on Luma

FRI 28TH NOVEMBER

  • 09:00 AM – 06:00 PM Hackday – Apache Lucene/Solr Contributions

A focused, hands-on day dedicated to contributing to Apache Lucene/Solr – from zero to your first real contribution.

  • Hands-on
    Gain practical experience working on real Apache Lucene/Solr issues, with a focus on vector search, semantic search, and LLM integrations.

  • Mentorship 
    Get one-to-one and group guidance from experienced committers on how to contribute effectively to Apache projects.

  • Impactful, real-world contributions 
    Work on changes that land in real projects – from documentation and tests to features that improve the open source ecosystem.

The session features Alessandro Benedetti, Apache Lucene/Solr committer and Apache Solr PMC Chair, and potentially other active committers, offering live mentoring, code review feedback, and a clear view of the path toward long-term involvement in the Lucene/Solr ecosystems.

Register

Event Organizers & Sponsors

The London search week events would not be possible without the efforts of these professionals and organizations.

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