hybrid-search
2 free lessons tagged hybrid-search across Computer Science, AI. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Lexical Meets Vector: Hybrid Search and Rank Fusion
Vector search did not replace keyword search, because the two fail in opposite places: BM25 cannot see that laptop and notebook mean the same thing, and embeddings cannot see that SKU-4471-B is not approximately anything. This lesson maps the two failure surfaces, then builds the production answer: run both retrievers and fuse the rankings, with reciprocal rank fusion done by hand.
Hybrid Search, Tuning, and Running It in Production
Dense vectors miss exact terms, so production retrieval combines them with lexical search. This lesson covers hybrid retrieval and reciprocal rank fusion, a tuning method that starts from a stated recall target, capacity planning, the operational failures that catch teams, and how to choose between running your own index and buying a service.