How to Build a Simple Search Engine with BM25 & Vespa (Full Tutorial)

Build Your Own Search Engine - Episode 1 In this video, we kick off a new series where we build a full search and RAG stack from the ground up. Today we start simple: a clean, classic BM25 keyword search engine powered by Vespa and Python. You’ll learn how to: • Create a Vespa application package • Define schemas, fields, and ranking profiles • Enable BM25 scoring • Spin up Vespa inside Docker • Stream a real-world web dataset from Hugging Face • Feed documents into Vespa with progress tracking • Run BM25-ranked search queries This is the foundation we’ll build on for the rest of the series: next episodes will explore vector search, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, and eventually full RAG pipelines. Please subscribe and like the video to help me keep motivated to make awesome videos like this one. :) Code: https://github.com/abhishekkrthakur/search Follow me on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/abhi1thakur LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhi1thakur/ Kaggle: https://kaggle.com/abhishek