Get the latest tech news

From grep to SPLADE: a journey through semantic search


Full-text search, BERT, embeddings, query expansion, and more—what an app developer needs to know about modern search technologies.

If you’ve attempted to implement it in your app, you may have discovered that what seems simple on the surface is a deeply challenging technical problem that has kept the brightest minds in computer science busy for decades. Rather than processing each word independently, the text is split into chunks and fed as a sequence into the LLM, allowing the model to perceive the richer semantics woven into our languages. The nature of most embedding models (and efficient dense vector search algorithms) means that—if you’re not careful—the same query could produce different results between runs.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of journey

journey

Photo of SPLADE

SPLADE

Photo of grep

grep

Related news:

News photo

Tech startup Odyssey goes on journey to help states implement school choice programs

News photo

A journey to the medical netherworld (2016)

News photo

Figma’s Journey to TypeScript