What is semantic search?

Semantic search finds documents or passages by meaning rather than by matching words. It embeds the query and every passage, then returns the passages whose embeddings are closest to the query’s. A search for “how the model is trained” can find “we pre-train on two tasks”, which keyword search would miss.

Keyword search is still better for exact names, codes and quotations. Many systems combine both.

Asking in full sentences helps: the embedding captures more of what you mean.