AI Glossary Term

What does “Hybrid Search” mean?

Definition

A retrieval approach that combines keyword (lexical) search with vector (semantic) search for better recall and precision.

Related terms

Semantic Search
Search that matches meaning rather than exact keyword overlap, often using embeddings.
Embedding Model
A model specialized for converting data into vectors used for semantic search, clustering, and retrieval.
Embedding
A numeric vector representation that captures semantic meaning of text, images, or other data.
Word Embedding
A dense vector representation of words capturing semantic relationships.
Retrieval Precision
The proportion of retrieved items that are relevant to the user's query.
Multi-Query Retrieval
A retrieval technique that rewrites the user query into several variants to improve recall.

Learn more in our free guides

AI SearchMultimodal SearchAI Research AssistantsGuided Beam Search with Constraints

See also

RerankerCross-EncoderHNSWBi-EncoderANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor)LLM-as-JudgeSentencePiecePass@k
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