AI Engineer Search Track: 30-Year-Old BM25 Emerges as Backbone of Agentic Search
jobergum · x · 2026-09-17
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 streamed its Search & Retrieval track, centered on the thesis that "the searcher changed before the search engine did" — machines are starting to search more than people do.
Talks include:
- Pinecone 2.0 (Edo Liberty)
- The unreasonable effectiveness of BM25 for agentic search (jobergum/Weaviate)
- Exa: a search engine for the agentic web
- MCP Apps: rebuilding the web for agents
- Mixedbread on designing agents as Knowledge Agents
- Docusign & NVIDIA: your agreements are a database you can't query — connecting AI to billions of legal documents
- Where RL will take search
Key takeaway: BM25, a scoring function essentially unchanged for 30 years, is proving surprisingly effective for agent search, and search infrastructure is being rebuilt around machine users.
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