What is Hybrid Search?

Explained

Hybrid search blends lexical matching with embedding similarity so systems find exact SKU or policy terms and paraphrased user questions. It is a best practice for enterprise RAG and knowledge bases.

Decision guides that use this term

• RAG vs enterprise search: do your people need answers or documents?

Further reading

• Vector Databases for RAG: Powering Semantic Search for LLMs
• Agentic RAG: The Engine for High-Trust Enterprise Automation

Related terms

• Embedding Dense numerical representation of text, image, or audio; enables semantic search.
• RAG Retrieve relevant documents and use them as context to generate the answer.
• Retrieval Search phase that fetches relevant documents or passages for a query.
• Vector Numerical representation; see Embedding.
• Big Data Large volumes of data requiring specialized tools; feedstock for training AI models.
• Context Engineering Designing what the model sees—retrieval, memory, summaries, and window budgeting.