Meetup at Catawiki | Elastic Netherlands User Group

Join us for a meetup on April 16th in the Catawiki office in Amsterdam! Doors open at 17.30 and we'll share some pizzas and drinks, followed by presentations from Catawiki, Elastic and Giftomatic. We wrap up around 20.30.

Address: Catawiki's office, Sint Jorissteeg 2, Floor 3, Amsterdam
The closest parking garages are:
- ParkBee Kalverstraat - Singel 451C, 1012 WP Amsterdam
- Q-Park Kalverstraat - Singel 451 C, 1012 WP Amsterdam
- Q-Park The Bank Rembrandtplein - Amstelstraat 12, 1017 DA Amsterdam

Agenda:
17.30 Doors open
17.45 Networking, food with drinks
18.15 Welcome by Catawiki
18.25 Use the Force , Use Vectors!
19.00 Semantic Search at Catawiki
19.35 Did we improve our search? Stop guessing - measure relevance like an engineer
20.10 Q&A
20.30 Wrap up

Talks:
Use the Force , Use Vectors !The rise of Generative AI is rapidly increasing the interest in managing vectors as data representations.
The Elastic platform has for a long time a vector database, and the capabilities to leverage this by its query engine. Many of recent innovations in Elastisearch are about increasing the capabilities around vectors, and accelerating the implementation of vector techniques by developers in search, chatbot, and RAG applications. This session will be an introduction to vectors, how these are implemented in Elastic, and , most importantly, how you can leverage them in your applications.

Speaker: Hans Heerooms, Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic

Semantic Search at Catawiki
In this session we’ll talk about:
- Search at Catawiki
- Keyword search
- Semantic search
- Vector search MVP
- Next steps

Miguel Mateus Pinho, Search Software Engineer, Catawiki

Did we improve our search? Stop guessing - measure relevance like an engineer
Your manager says, 'Our search isn’t working well—make it better.' So, you try semantic search, and for a few test queries, the results look great. But what does 'better' actually mean? And did we really improve search performance at scale with real production traffic?
In this talk, I’ll explore different ways to measure search relevance and focus on offline testing from a software engineering perspective—providing practical methods to evaluate and improve search quality without just guessing.

Speaker: Arian Stolwijk, Giftomatic

Thank you for hosting us Catawiki!