About
Who writes this
I am JR Oakes, VP of Technology at LOCOMOTIVE Agency. I work in technical SEO and applied machine learning, build open-source tools, and stay active in the search and machine learning community. My background is the overlap between how search systems work and how machine learning models reason about text.
What this site is
This site collects clear, worked explainers of algorithms adjacent to search and information retrieval (IR). The angle is AI-forward: each piece connects a classic IR, graph, hashing, or sequence algorithm to how modern systems work, including search engines, large language models (LLMs), agents, and recommendation.
Every explainer pairs three things: a plain-language explanation of what the algorithm does and why, the actual math behind it, and a concrete tie back to search and AI. Where it helps, a piece includes a silent companion animation so you can watch the mechanism run.