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The Basics of AI-Powered (Vector) Search
How the modern AI boom has completely revolutionized search applications…
The recent generative AI boom and advent of large language models (LLMs) has led many to wonder about the evolution of search engines. Will dialogue-based LLMs replace traditional search engines, or will the tendency of these models to hallucinate make them an untrustworthy source of information? Currently, the answer to these questions is unclear, but the quick adoption of AI-centric search systems such as you.com and perplexity.ai indicates a widespread interest in augmenting search engines with modern advancements in language models. Ironically, however, we have been heavily utilizing language models within search engines for years! The proposal of BERT [1] led to a step-function improvement in our ability to assess semantic textual similarity, causing these language models to be adopted by a variety of popular search engines (including Google!). Within this overview, we will analyze the components of such AI-powered search systems.
Basic Components of a Search Engine
