RT Avi Chawla (@_avichawla)Vector search is not always the answer.A 30-year-old algorithm with zero training, zero embeddings, and zero fine-tuning still powers Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and most production search systems today.It's called BM25, and it's worth understanding why it refuses to die.Let's say you're searching for "transformer attention mechanism" in a library of ML papers.BM25 scores documents using three core ideas:1) Word rarity matters more than word frequencyEvery paper contains "the" and ...

Vector search is not always the answer.A 30-year-old algorithm with zero training, zero embeddings, and zero fine-tuning still powers Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and most production search systems today.It's called BM25, and it's worth understanding why it refuses to die.Let's say you're searching for "transformer attention mechanism" in a library of ML papers.BM25 scores documents using three core ideas:1) Word rarity matters more than word frequencyEvery paper contains "the" and "is" so those words carry n ...