Trey Grainger

Searchkernel

Trey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections.

He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science focused on building self-learning search platforms integrating the most successful AI Search techniques.

Trey teaches AI Search in the course AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents with Doug Turnbull.

Sessions

Learning to Understand: A Missing Stage of Modern Retrieval

Talk

6. May 2026, 10:20 - 11:05

Main Stage

We introduce “Learning to Understand” as a corollary to the well known “Learning to Rank” process. By using evals to learn domain-specific query interpretation and rewriting rules and combining with semantic statistics from your index, it’s possible to significantly improve search quality beyond typical BM25, vector, and hybrid search techniques.

Do we still need search engines?

Talk

7. May 2026, 13:15 - 14:00

Main Stage

Search has a new User Interface! All search will be Agentic/RAG and delivered through a chat interface! The days of the monolithic search engine are over!