# Oppority > Jayesh Shende on enterprise search, the operation of search systems, and the notes and books published as Oppority. Jayesh Shende builds enterprise search systems and leads the engineers who operate them. The work, the notes, and the books are published here under the name Oppority. ## In short ### Who is Jayesh Shende? Jayesh Shende is an engineering manager and search engineer. For about ten years his work has centered on Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch. He publishes books and notes under the name Oppority. ### What is Oppority? Oppority is the name on Jayesh Shende's books and notes. ### Where does he publish? Notes are on this site, on Medium, and on DEV. The Kindle books are on Amazon. ### Where is the work described? The Work page lists each record in the same form: the problem, the approach, and the conclusion. Each subject page collects the records and the notes that belong to it. ### Is Jayesh Shende available for a role? Jayesh Shende is open to full-time employment and to a long-term contract that would be the role, including work as a forward deployed search engineer. He is also open to a commitment with a team, a project, a company, or an advisory board. A conversation starts on LinkedIn. ## Work - [Public search at country scale](https://oppority.com/work/public-search.md): Search a citizen can use: a polling place, a beneficiary record, found in hundreds of millions of rows. Subjects: Enterprise search, Apache Solr. - [Concept search before vectors were the default](https://oppority.com/work/concept-search.md): A books-and-journals search that let people explore by concepts, built in 2018 from phrases and similarity, not from a vector database. Subjects: Apache Solr, Relevance, Hybrid search. - [One catalog, many storefronts](https://oppority.com/work/retail-search.md): E-commerce search for one catalog across a website, a marketplace, and stores: product search, autosuggest, filters, and per-field similarity. Subjects: Relevance, Apache Solr, Enterprise search. - [Recommendations in the result, and beside it](https://oppority.com/work/related-results.md): Recommendations served by the search engine in two places: inside the result list, and alongside it. Subjects: Relevance, Enterprise search. - [Return one record, not a list](https://oppority.com/work/one-best-record.md): High-precision identification: from millions of candidates that share an organisation's name and address, return the single best record. Subjects: Relevance, Enterprise search. - [A move that kept the answers](https://oppority.com/work/platform-move.md): A production move from self-managed Apache Solr to managed OpenSearch, checked by whether the top results still agreed. Subjects: Apache Solr, OpenSearch, Relevance, Enterprise search. - [The team's output](https://oppority.com/work/search-team.md): Leading a search engineering group while staying close enough to the system to tell a relevance question from an operations question. Subjects: Engineering management, Enterprise search, Apache Solr. - [A new engine, tried on a laptop](https://oppority.com/work/reading-luxir.md): A hands-on reading of Luxir, a new hybrid search engine, run from a Mac or Windows laptop without compiling C++. Subjects: Luxir, Hybrid search, Guides. ## Subjects - [Information retrieval](https://oppority.com/topics/information-retrieval.md): Finding a recorded item that answers a need. Search engines, relevance, and the structure of the data sit under this subject. It is the field I study. - [Information retrieval / Search engines](https://oppority.com/topics/search-engines.md): The libraries and servers that keep an index and answer a query. The names under this subject are systems I have read and worked with. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / Enterprise search](https://oppority.com/topics/enterprise-search.md): Search run for the people of one organization: schema, analyzers, ranking, and the daily work of keeping results trustworthy. About ten years of practice sit in this subject. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / Apache Lucene](https://oppority.com/topics/apache-lucene.md): The Java library under many search servers. Inverted indexes, analysis chains, and similarity scoring. Solr and Elasticsearch are built on it. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / Apache Solr](https://oppority.com/topics/apache-solr.md): A search server on Apache Lucene: schema, request handlers, and the operation of a cluster. It is the engine I have spent the most years with. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / Elasticsearch](https://oppority.com/topics/elasticsearch.md): A distributed search and analytics engine on Apache Lucene. I have used it in the same years as Solr. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / OpenSearch](https://oppority.com/topics/opensearch.md): A search engine in the Lucene family, in the same line of study as Solr, including what has to remain true in the top results when an index moves. - [Information retrieval / Search engines / Luxir](https://oppority.com/topics/luxir.md): An open-source hybrid search engine by Yonik Seeley, the original author of Apache Solr. Text, vectors, facets, and geo over HTTP. My note is a laptop guide for the official Linux binary. - [Information retrieval / Relevance](https://oppority.com/topics/relevance.md): Whether the result a person receives is one they can act on. Hybrid ranking, similarity, and the structure of the data sit under this subject. - [Information retrieval / Relevance / Hybrid search](https://oppority.com/topics/hybrid-search.md): Lexical ranking such as BM25 combined with vector similarity in one result. The useful question is when each signal should win, and how to check that the blend did not quietly get worse. - [Information retrieval / Relevance / Similarity](https://oppority.com/topics/similarity.md): How a ranker decides that two items are close: a lexical score such as BM25, or a vector score such as cosine. I study the choice, and how to tell that a new score did not quietly get worse. - [Information retrieval / Relevance / Data structuring](https://oppority.com/topics/data-structuring.md): The shape of the data before a ranker runs. Vector search and lexical tagging sit under this subject. The structure decides what close is allowed to mean. - [Information retrieval / Relevance / Data structuring / Vector search](https://oppority.com/topics/vector-search.md): Search by nearest neighbor in an embedding space. I am studying when a dense signal helps, and when a precise lexical handle should outrank it. - [Information retrieval / Relevance / Data structuring / Lexical tagging](https://oppority.com/topics/lexical-tagging.md): Tokens, entities, and tags taken from the text itself, including tags extracted with classical tools or with a language model. A label a person can read, used as a handle for lexical retrieval. - [Quantum computing](https://oppority.com/topics/quantum-computing.md): A subject I am reading, outside the systems I operate. The question that interests me is which computations change on a quantum machine, and which stay classical. - [Quantum computing / Quantum search](https://oppority.com/topics/quantum-search.md): A reading of Grover's search beside classical search. Grover marks items in an unstructured list. Indexes, trees, and neighbor graphs already add structure, so a quantum search needs its own representation. This is a study note. - [AI visibility](https://oppority.com/topics/ai-visibility.md): How an assistant finds a page and names it in an answer. Answer-engine optimization and generative-engine optimization are names for that question. Citing a page is a different job from retrieving a document. - [AI visibility / Answer engines](https://oppority.com/topics/answer-engines.md): How assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity choose a source and name it. I study this because I work on retrieval. - [Leadership](https://oppority.com/topics/leadership.md): How a team's output becomes something a person can trust. The published books and the notes on ownership sit here. - [Leadership / Engineering management](https://oppority.com/topics/engineering-management.md): The work after the promotion: the team's output, the first 90 days, and the conversations nobody scripts for you. The Kindle book is the long version. - [Leadership / Software engineering](https://oppority.com/topics/software-engineering.md): How software gets designed, shipped, and owned after the tutorial ends. The published book is a week-by-week plan for a first programming job. - [Practice](https://oppority.com/topics/practice.md): Notes that are procedures: a guide you can follow, and the shell details inside one. - [Practice / Guides](https://oppority.com/topics/guides.md): Step-by-step pages. A guide on this site is something you can follow, with the limits written down, including when a setup is only for a laptop. - [Practice / Shell](https://oppority.com/topics/shell.md): Notes on the Unix shell, including Bash parameters used in real scripts. The 2020 note lives on Medium and is indexed here. ## Writing - [Ownership is the gap](https://oppority.com/writing/ownership-is-the-gap.md): 2026-10-19. Coding skill gets a developer hired. Owning the outcome is what makes a team trust them in the first months. - [Run Luxir on a Mac or Windows laptop (no Linux, no C++)](https://oppority.com/writing/run-luxir-on-a-mac-or-windows-laptop.md): 2026-09-26. How I run the official Luxir Linux binary in Docker on a Mac or Windows laptop, including ARM machines, without installing Linux or compiling C++. - [Your output is no longer your output](https://oppority.com/writing/first-90-days-new-engineering-manager.md): 2026-09-05. The promotion that turns a strong engineer into a manager, and the sentence that should replace heroics in the first month. - [Special variables in Bash](https://oppority.com/writing/special-variables-in-bash.md): 2020-05-02. A 2020 note on the special parameters Bash exposes to a running script: arguments, exit status, and process id. The original is on Medium, and this page is the index entry. ## Books - [Your First 90 Days as a New Engineering Manager](https://oppority.com/books/first-90-days-engineering-manager.md): Scripts, checklists, and a week-by-week plan for first-time tech leads and new engineering managers. - [Your First 90 Days as a Software Developer](https://oppority.com/books/first-90-days-software-developer.md): A week-by-week ramp, plus field guides for day 90 and beyond.