André Charton
André has worked with software for ages (Robotron KC 87), and he found his passion in building scalable search apps. He studied computer science at TU Berlin and has more than 15+ years of experience in classifieds and a deep search footprint across SQL, Solr, Elasticsearch, and Vespa.
Session
06-09
16:50
20min
From Legacy Search to Vespa: What a Real PoC Taught Us
André Charton, Valeriia Platonova
For years, Germany’s largest classifieds website relied on a search-first relevance approach because structured data was sparse. This talk shares how we introduced Vespa in the Motors category, enriched signals with embeddings and extracted attributes, and migrated step by step; what worked, what failed, and which lessons only a real PoC reveals.
Kesselhaus