Technique
Hybrid Search
Combining lexical (BM25) and vector search scores to get the best of both worlds.
Definition
Hybrid search blends BM25's exactness with dense embeddings' semantic recall, typically via reciprocal-rank fusion or learned weighting. It outperforms either approach alone on most retrieval benchmarks and is standard in Weaviate, Qdrant and Elasticsearch.
Common use cases
- Enterprise search
- RAG
- Multilingual retrieval