Build a News recommendation app from python with Vespa: Part 1

Thiago Martins, a data scientist at Vespa, outlines the process of building a news recommendation app using Vespa within a Python environment in the first part of a tutorial series. This initial installment focuses on creating basic news search functionality, leveraging the demo version of the Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) for demonstration purposes. The tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on setting up the app, including installing the necessary tools like pyvespa, creating an application package, adding fields to the schema, and deploying the app using Docker. The article also explains how to feed data into the app and query it using Vespa's query API, enabling users to perform searches and sort results based on relevance scores. Additionally, it introduces an enhanced ranking feature that incorporates article popularity, which is determined by the ratio of clicks to impressions, although it acknowledges that this simplistic measure could be improved with machine learning in future implementations.