Lesson 3.1
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.
6mAdvanced6,300 students
Sign in to watch this lesson
Browsing is free. Create an account to play videos and track your progress.
Overview
Vector search misses exact identifiers; keyword search misses paraphrase. Running both and fusing the rankings covers each one’s blind spot.
What this lesson covers
- Combine lexical and semantic result sets
- Fuse rankings rather than concatenating them
- Fall back to keyword search when embeddings are unavailable
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.