Part 1 Modern search relevance

 

Search engines serve as the gateway to accessing most of human knowledge. Web search engines offer a queryable cache of the internet, allowing you to instantly find information on any topic across billions of websites. Generative AI (artificial intelligence) relies heavily on search engines to perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which is the process of using search to find relevant context to provide to AI models so that they generate accurate responses for incoming prompts.

Search algorithms also power matching and ranking in most data-driven applications: from e-commerce, to email, to social media, to company intranets and private filesystems. Performing search well requires optimizing search relevance—the ability to find and rank the most relevant results for a given query.