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Semantic search

Ricerca semantica

Semantic search is a way of finding information by meaning rather than by literal word matching. Traditional search compares text strings: you search "automobile" and miss documents about a "car" because the letters differ. Semantic search instead turns your question and the documents into numerical vectors that capture their sense, then compares those meanings. It is like a skilled librarian who, when you ask for "a book on space travel", also brings astronautics and science-fiction texts without those exact words. It catches synonyms, paraphrases and context, overcoming the limits of plain keyword search.

Definition

Semantic search matters because it makes information retrieval far more natural and forgiving: it grasps the user's intent, not just their terms. It is the basis of modern search engines, assistants and RAG systems that must find the right passages to feed the model.

Related terms

• Embedding
• Vector database
• Retrieval
• Reranking
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)

More in Fondamenti AI

• LLM (Large Language Model)
• Token
• Context Window
• Temperature
• AI Hallucination
• Fine-tuning
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• Embedding

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