Search Glossary

Browse 25 search terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

25 Search Terms

AI Search
Search functionality enhanced by AI techniques such as semantic ranking, embeddings, query rewriting, or answer generation. AI search is often designed to...
Apache Lucene
A foundational open-source search library used to build indexing and full-text search capabilities.
Approximate Nearest Neighbor
A similarity search method that trades exact recall for much faster lookup in high-dimensional vector spaces. It influences how models are trained, evaluated,...
Backtracking
Backtracking is an algorithmic technique that incrementally builds candidates for a solution and abandons a candidate (backtracks) as soon as it determines...
Beam Search
A decoding strategy that keeps the top-scoring partial sequences instead of only the single best candidate. It influences how models are trained, evaluated, or...
Dense Retrieval
A search approach that retrieves items by comparing learned dense embeddings rather than sparse term overlap. It influences how models are trained, evaluated,...
Depth-First Search
A Depth-First Search is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Elastic Beanstalk
An Elastic Beanstalk is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Elastic Search
An Elastic Search is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Elastic Stack
The ecosystem around Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and related tools for search, log analysis, and observability.
Full-Text Search
A Full-Text Search is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Generative Search
A search experience in which AI generates synthesized answers or summaries based on retrieved sources instead of only returning ranked links. Generative search...
Google It
A blunt instruction to search for an answer yourself rather than asking for easily discoverable information. In tech it can be practical, lazy, or rude...
Grep Everything
A brute-force debugging or exploration tactic of searching the entire codebase or log set for anything that looks relevant. It reflects how often plain text...
Learning to Rank
A family of methods that train models to order results by relevance or utility. It influences how models are trained, evaluated, or served, and it can...
Neural Search
Search based on learned vector representations and semantic similarity rather than only keyword overlap. Neural search is widely used to improve relevance when...
Package Search
The process or tooling used to discover packages by name, function, tag, or metadata within a package ecosystem. In open-source culture, good package search...
RAG Search
The retrieval search process within a retrieval-augmented generation system, often combining semantic, keyword, or hybrid approaches. RAG search determines...
retrieval
In the context of LLM applications, the process of fetching relevant documents or data chunks from an external knowledge base to provide as context for the...
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
An architecture that improves LLM outputs by first retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base, then including them in the prompt as context....
Semantic Search
Search based on the meaning of queries rather than keyword matching. Converts both queries and documents into vector embeddings and finds the nearest matches...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization — the practice of improving a website's visibility in search engine results through content quality, technical structure, and link...
Trie
A tree-like data structure (also called a prefix tree) where each node represents a character and paths from root to leaf represent stored strings. Enables...
Vector Database
A database optimized for storing and querying high-dimensional vectors (embeddings). Uses approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms like HNSW or IVF to...
Weaviate
An open-source vector database that combines vector search with structured filtering and keyword search in a single engine. Weaviate can automatically...

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