AI Glossary

Semantic search

Search that finds results by meaning rather than by exact words, often by comparing embeddings, so a search for "cheap flights" can find a page about "low airfares".

See also

  • Embedding

    A list of numbers that represents a piece of text, an image or other data, learned so that similar items get nearby lists.

  • Retrieval-augmented generation

    A technique in which a system first searches a collection of documents for passages relevant to a question, then gives them to the model so its answer draws on those sources rather than on memory alone.

  • Grounding

    Tying a model's answer to specific sources it was given, such as documents or search results, so the answer can be checked against them.

Source: Reimers and Gurevych, Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks (2019) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

CC BY 4.0, attribution required.

This term

Orbyt Labs, Semantic search (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/semantic-search

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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