GLOSSARY
Hybrid Search
Combining keyword search with vector search so RAG finds both the exact SKU and the paraphrased paragraph.
Pure vector search is great at meaning and bad at rare tokens: product IDs, error codes, names. Pure keyword search is the reverse. Hybrid search runs both — sparse (BM25 or learned sparse) plus dense embeddings — and fuses the rankings, often with a reranker on top.
Qdrant, Weaviate and most serious RAG stacks now treat hybrid as the default, not a trick. The work is in the fusion: too much keyword and you miss paraphrases; too much vector and you miss the exact string the user pasted. Measure on your corpus, not a demo.