retrieval-strategy
retrieval-strategy
Covers the non-obvious decisions, failure modes, and tuning levers across retrieval approaches. Assumes familiarity with embeddings and basic vector DB APIs.
1. Choosing a Strategy
| Signal | Use |
|---|---|
| Queries are natural language, corpus is prose | Similarity search alone (baseline) |
| Queries contain exact terms, model names, IDs, codes | Hybrid (semantic + keyword) |
| Top-k recall is good but ranking is wrong | Add reranker |
| Results are redundant / clustered around one subtopic | MMR |
| Long documents, multi-hop questions | Hierarchical retrieval |
Don't default to hybrid + rerank everywhere. Each layer adds latency and a new failure surface. Start minimal, instrument, then add layers where metrics show it helps.
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