Free short course
Retrieval engineering: beyond document chat
Investigate chunk boundaries, hybrid search, reranking and evidence tracing in RAG systems.
This course is free in full: every module, knowledge check and the final task, with no sign-up.
Investigate chunk boundaries, hybrid search, reranking and evidence tracing in RAG systems.
Read Inside language models first; understand basic document search. Each lesson includes a worked example, a practice task and an answer explanation. Allow about 12 minutes per lesson, five minutes for the knowledge check and 30 minutes for the final assignment. The reading is concise; the study time includes doing the exercises.
All scenarios are fictional. No paid subscription, specialist hardware or live AI integration is required to complete the written exercises. Advanced courses teach design and evaluation principles; they do not claim to provide a production implementation or professional accreditation.
By the end, you'll be able to…
- Design a retrieval test pack and diagnose whether failures occur before or after generation.
- Keep a rule and its qualifying context together.
- Distinguish relevance filtering from access control.
- Combine retrieval signals when exact matches matter.
- Separate finding candidates from ordering them.
- Check that each consequential claim is supported.
What's in it
- Module 1: Retrieval engineering: beyond document chat in practice
Design a retrieval test pack and diagnose whether failures occur before or after generation.
- Finishing the course
One final task that puts the whole method to work on something real.