Semantic search

Search by meaning (powered by embeddings) rather than by exact words. A query for "staff turnover" finds the document titled "why employees leave."

Where it sits among its neighbours: RAG is the whole open-book-exam recipe, retrieval is the step that goes and fetches the page, and semantic search is the technique that makes fetching work when the wording doesn't match.

Why it matters: real people never phrase things the way documents do. Semantic search is why AI-era search works where keyword search didn't.

Related: Embedding · Retrieval · RAG