Semantic Search: Searching by Meaning Instead of Keywords
Semantic Search: Searching by Meaning Instead of Keywords
Keyword search fails when phrasing changes. Semantic search solves this by comparing meaning instead of words.
1) Keyword Search Limitation
If your document contains "annual revenue" but user searches "yearly income", keyword search may fail.
2) Semantic Similarity
By converting both query and document into embeddings, we compare their vector distance.
The closer the vectors, the more similar the meaning.
3) Similarity Metrics
- Cosine similarity
- Dot product
- Euclidean distance
4) Enterprise Application
- Internal knowledge assistants
- Legal document search
- Technical documentation bots
5) Summary
Semantic search improves retrieval accuracy dramatically, which directly improves final AI response quality.
