Lesson 3.17mAdvanced6.3k students

Hybrid keyword and vector search

Vector search misses exact identifiers; keyword search misses paraphrase. Running both and fusing the rankings covers each one’s blind spot.

This lesson sits in Retrieval Quality, part of Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Scratch. It assumes what came before it and leads directly into the next lesson in the module.

In this lesson you will

  • Combine lexical and semantic result sets
  • Fuse rankings rather than concatenating them
  • Fall back to keyword search when embeddings are unavailable

Pro tip

If embeddings are switched off in your environment, wildcarded keyword matching is the fallback that still works.

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