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Traditional (SQL) databases rely primarily on keyword-based searches to retrieve information. These searches match the exact words or phrases in your query to the text stored in the database. While effective for many applications, this method has limitations when it comes to understanding context or finding relevant information that... doesn’t include the exact keywords. Hybrid search combines the strengths of traditional keyword-based BM25 search with the advanced capabilities of semantic search. To effectively implement a hybrid search, a vector database is essential. Vector databases go beyond just words; they understand the meaning behind the data. They transform data such as text, images, or audio into numerical representations called vectors. These vector embeddings enable the database to find similar items, even if they don't share exact keywords. When you integrate hybrid search with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, you can achieve higher accuracy in retrieved context and better output in generated responses. Learn more about RAG systems in this video with Victoria Slocum:show more

Femke Plantinga

12,924 subscribers

139,979 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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9 Comments

Abhishek Singh1 year ago

Really effective and simple explanation Femke! How did you generate the diagram animation?

Femke Plantinga1 year ago

Thank you! Kudos @victorialslocum to animating these designs. 🫶 Rive is great for making these.

esamyak Indore1 year ago

cleared concepts thanks

Femke Plantinga1 year ago

Thank you! 🙏

digid1 year ago

Wow! Awesome work! I will check the material to learn more, but what I've watched so far it's pretty clever. Congrats!

QuantizedHuman1 year ago

The dutch accent always shines through, lol. Well explained. (Goed gedaan, en ik dol gwn een beetje.)

Nikhil Kumar1 year ago

Nice, but still need to maintain relation between tables for complex schemas

John the Scott1 year ago

huh? sql derives from predicate logic. would you describe predicate logic as "keyword-based"?

Manny Bernabe1 year ago

So good.

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Femke Plantinga

23,911 views • 1 year ago

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137,034 views • 2 years ago

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Clara Shih

49,607 views • 2 years ago

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Femke Plantinga

120,565 views • 1 year ago

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40,441 views • 1 year ago

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146,200 views • 1 year ago

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124,314 views • 10 months ago

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420,673 views • 2 years ago

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Anni Wang

12,935 views • 1 month ago

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Andrew Ng

71,672 views • 1 year ago

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20,181 views • 3 months ago

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Santiago

109,517 views • 1 year ago

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Researchers built a new RAG approach that: - does not need a vector DB. - does not embed data. - involves no chunking. - performs no similarity search. And it hit 98.7% accuracy on a financial benchmark (SOTA). Here's the core problem with RAG that this new approach solves: Traditional RAG chunks documents, embeds them into vectors, and retrieves based on semantic similarity. But similarity ≠ relevance. When you ask "What were the debt trends in 2023?", a vector search returns chunks that look similar. But the actual answer might be buried in some Appendix, referenced on some page, in a section that shares zero semantic overlap with your query. Traditional RAG would likely never find it. PageIndex (open-source) solves this. Instead of chunking and embedding, PageIndex builds a hierarchical tree structure from your documents, like an intelligent table of contents. Then it uses reasoning to traverse that tree. For instance, the model doesn't ask: "What text looks similar to this query?" Instead, it asks: "Based on this document's structure, where would a human expert look for this answer?" That's a fundamentally different approach with: - No arbitrary chunking that breaks context. - No vector DB infrastructure to maintain. - Traceable retrieval to see exactly why it chose a specific section. - The ability to see in-document references ("see Table 5.3") the way a human would. But here's the deeper issue that it solves. Vector search treats every query as independent. But documents have structure and logic, like sections that reference other sections and context that builds across pages. PageIndex respects that structure instead of flattening it into embeddings. Do note that this approach may not make sense in every use case since traditional vector search is still fast, simple, and works well for many applications. But for professional documents that require domain expertise and multi-step reasoning, this tree-based, reasoning-first approach shines. For instance, PageIndex achieved 98.7% accuracy on FinanceBench, significantly outperforming traditional vector-based RAG systems on complex financial document analysis. Everything is fully open-source, so you can see the full implementation in GitHub and try it yourself. I have shared the GitHub repo in the replies!

Avi Chawla

970,893 views • 4 months ago

New short course: Building Multimodal Search and RAG", by Weaviate AI Database's Sebastia(N_) Witalec ✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿. Contrastive learning is used to train models to map vectors into an embedding space by pulling similar concepts closer together and pushing dissimilar concepts away from each other. This technique is also used to train multimodal embedding models that capture semantic similarity across different modalities like text, images, and audio. These multimodal embeddings can be used to build multimodal search and RAG systems. In this course, you'll learn how contrastive learning works, and how to add multimodality to RAG – so your models can draw on diverse, relevant context to answer questions. For example, a query about a financial report might synthesize information from text snippets, graphs, tables, and slides. You will also learn how visual instruction tuning lets you integrate image understanding into language models, and build a multi-vector recommender system using Weaviate’s open-source vector database. Please sign up here:

New short course: Building Multimodal Search and RAG", by Weaviate AI Database's Sebastia(N_) Witalec ✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿. Contrastive learning is used to train models to map vectors into an embedding space by pulling similar concepts closer together and pushing dissimilar concepts away from each other. This technique is also used to train multimodal embedding models that capture semantic similarity across different modalities like text, images, and audio. These multimodal embeddings can be used to build multimodal search and RAG systems. In this course, you'll learn how contrastive learning works, and how to add multimodality to RAG – so your models can draw on diverse, relevant context to answer questions. For example, a query about a financial report might synthesize information from text snippets, graphs, tables, and slides. You will also learn how visual instruction tuning lets you integrate image understanding into language models, and build a multi-vector recommender system using Weaviate’s open-source vector database. Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

104,371 views • 2 years ago

Supabase can be used as a vector database! This means that you can perform a semantic search against Supabase! This allows you to create RAG apps or content recommendation engines on top of Supabase! Learn what embeddings are, and how you can use them 👇

Supabase can be used as a vector database! This means that you can perform a semantic search against Supabase! This allows you to create RAG apps or content recommendation engines on top of Supabase! Learn what embeddings are, and how you can use them 👇

Tyler Shukert

39,359 views • 1 year ago

Big moment for Postgres! AI agents broke the idea of what a database is supposed to do. Traditional databases were built for humans, and Agents broke that model. - They branch endlessly. - They run ten experiments at once. - They need isolation, context, memory, structured reasoning, and safe sandboxes. Letting agents touch production systems is terrifying because the old model of Postgres was never built for this kind of behavior. Agentic Postgres is an agent-ready version of Postgres by TimescaleDB (by Tiger Data) that solves this. I think it is one of the biggest upgrades to the Agent stack this year and Tiger Data is working with me on this post to share what they did. Some key features: > It instantly creates branches of an entire database, which is perfect for parallel agent evals, safe experiments, migrations, or isolated testing. Forks take seconds and cost almost nothing. > It comes with a built-in MCP server, which agents can use to get schema guidance, best practices, and safe, structured access to Postgres. This is also helpful to run migrations with a real understanding. > It comes with actual hybrid search (vector search and BM25), so Agents can retrieve data directly inside the database. > The database is Memory native. This gives a persistent context for Agents to evolve. This is one of the first times I have seen Postgres feel ready for the AI native era.

Big moment for Postgres! AI agents broke the idea of what a database is supposed to do. Traditional databases were built for humans, and Agents broke that model. - They branch endlessly. - They run ten experiments at once. - They need isolation, context, memory, structured reasoning, and safe sandboxes. Letting agents touch production systems is terrifying because the old model of Postgres was never built for this kind of behavior. Agentic Postgres is an agent-ready version of Postgres by TimescaleDB (by Tiger Data) that solves this. I think it is one of the biggest upgrades to the Agent stack this year and Tiger Data is working with me on this post to share what they did. Some key features: > It instantly creates branches of an entire database, which is perfect for parallel agent evals, safe experiments, migrations, or isolated testing. Forks take seconds and cost almost nothing. > It comes with a built-in MCP server, which agents can use to get schema guidance, best practices, and safe, structured access to Postgres. This is also helpful to run migrations with a real understanding. > It comes with actual hybrid search (vector search and BM25), so Agents can retrieve data directly inside the database. > The database is Memory native. This gives a persistent context for Agents to evolve. This is one of the first times I have seen Postgres feel ready for the AI native era.

Avi Chawla

94,290 views • 6 months ago

LangChain: Chat with Your Data, a new free short course created with Harrison Chase, is now available! In this 1 hour course, you’ll learn how to build one of the most requested LLM-based applications: Answering questions using information from a document or collection of documents (often called Retrieval Augmented Generation). You'll also learn how to use vector stores and embeddings to retrieve document chunks relevant to a query. I hope you enjoy the course!

LangChain: Chat with Your Data, a new free short course created with Harrison Chase, is now available! In this 1 hour course, you’ll learn how to build one of the most requested LLM-based applications: Answering questions using information from a document or collection of documents (often called Retrieval Augmented Generation). You'll also learn how to use vector stores and embeddings to retrieve document chunks relevant to a query. I hope you enjoy the course!

Andrew Ng

384,156 views • 2 years ago

I present to you my AI automation that converts your Google Drive folder to RAG vector database. It also updates the RAG vector database whenever a new file is added or deleted from the Google Drive folder. You can download the workflow for free (link in comment)

I present to you my AI automation that converts your Google Drive folder to RAG vector database. It also updates the RAG vector database whenever a new file is added or deleted from the Google Drive folder. You can download the workflow for free (link in comment)

Victor

260,273 views • 1 year ago

We’re expanding the Gemini API File Search tool 🔍 with 3 new updates that enable developers to more easily build multimodal RAG systems with enhanced precision: + Multimodal Support: By leveraging our Gemini Embedding 2 model, File Search can now reason across image and text simultaneously. + Custom Metadata Filtering: Bring structure to unstructured data by tagging files with custom key-value labels. This pre-filters your data and boosts search speed. + Exact citations: File Search can now capture and return the exact source (down to the page number) for every piece of information indexed. See multimodal File Search in action with our example app in Google AI Studio. Chat with your entire image and doc library, ask questions, and trace answers back to the source:

We’re expanding the Gemini API File Search tool 🔍 with 3 new updates that enable developers to more easily build multimodal RAG systems with enhanced precision: + Multimodal Support: By leveraging our Gemini Embedding 2 model, File Search can now reason across image and text simultaneously. + Custom Metadata Filtering: Bring structure to unstructured data by tagging files with custom key-value labels. This pre-filters your data and boosts search speed. + Exact citations: File Search can now capture and return the exact source (down to the page number) for every piece of information indexed. See multimodal File Search in action with our example app in Google AI Studio. Chat with your entire image and doc library, ask questions, and trace answers back to the source:

Google AI Developers

108,381 views • 1 month ago

everybody talks about building AI chatbots, but nobody tells you HOW to do it that's why I made a full practical walkthrough on how to build an AI chatbot that's hooked up to your own custom knowledgebase inside of the walk-through i go over: – data collection: gathering all relevant documents, conversations, and info - preprocessing: cleaning up and formatting the collected data - chunking: break down the cleaned data into smaller, manageable pieces - embedding & storing in a vector database - RAG & chatbot integration: using RAG to allow the chatbot to retrieve relevant information from the vector database based on a user's question reply to this tweet w/ the word “RAG” & I’ll send it to you (must be following so I can DM)

everybody talks about building AI chatbots, but nobody tells you HOW to do it that's why I made a full practical walkthrough on how to build an AI chatbot that's hooked up to your own custom knowledgebase inside of the walk-through i go over: – data collection: gathering all relevant documents, conversations, and info - preprocessing: cleaning up and formatting the collected data - chunking: break down the cleaned data into smaller, manageable pieces - embedding & storing in a vector database - RAG & chatbot integration: using RAG to allow the chatbot to retrieve relevant information from the vector database based on a user's question reply to this tweet w/ the word “RAG” & I’ll send it to you (must be following so I can DM)

Tyler

83,479 views • 1 year ago