About the author
Alex is a principal consultant on the services EMEA team. He holds a master's degree in computer engineering from the University of Toronto, a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba, and an MBA from the IESE Business School in Barcelona. Check out his personal blog at www.AlexMarquardt.com.
Author's articles
May 6, 2026
Multi-tier search with Elastic for ecommerce search governance: Fixing poor recall
Learn how to build a multi-tier retrieval strategy used to execute ecommerce governed search plans and improve recall management. We'll cover how to orchestrate semantic matching while maintaining stable results, facets, and pagination.
May 4, 2026
Elasticsearch percolator for ecommerce search governance: translating ambiguous queries into controlled retrieval strategies
Learn how to use the Elasticsearch percolator to implement search governance. In this blog, we outline the patterns needed to create a governed policy engine in production and create a controlled retrieval strategy.
May 1, 2026
Building a control plane to govern ecommerce search
How to build a governed control plane for ecommerce that composes conflicting search policies into a single execution plan (without code changes).
April 28, 2026
Accelerating merchandising improvements with a governed control plane
Search behavior changes shouldn't require an engineering ticket. Learn how a governed control plane lets business teams update search policies in hours, without deployments, without risk.
April 9, 2026
Why ecommerce search needs governance
Learn why ecommerce search falls short without governance and how a control layer ensures predictable and intent-driven results, thus improving retrieval.
December 22, 2025
Influencing BM25 ranking with multiplicative boosting in Elasticsearch
Learn why additive boosting methods can destabilize BM25 rankings and how multiplicative scoring provides controlled, scalable ranking influence in Elasticsearch.
December 17, 2025
Boosting e-commerce search by profit and popularity with the function score query in Elasticsearch
Discover how to optimize e-commerce search by blending BM25 relevance with profit margin and popularity signals in Elasticsearch using the function_score query.
December 10, 2025
How to improve e-commerce search relevance with personalized cohort-aware ranking
Improve e-commerce search relevance with explainable, cohort-aware ranking in Elasticsearch. Learn how multiplicative boosting delivers stable, predictable personalization at query time.
December 8, 2025
How excessive replica counts can degrade performance, and what to do about it
Learn about the impact of high replica counts in Elasticsearch, and how to ensure cluster stability by right-sizing your replicas.
October 21, 2024
Efficient bitwise matching in Elasticsearch
Explore six approaches to encoding and matching binary data in Elasticsearch, including terms encoding (my preferred approach), boolean encoding, sparse bit position encoding, integer encoding with exact matching, integer encoding with scripted bitwise matching, and integer encoding with ESQL for bitwise matching, with practical examples and use cases.