Best Concept: Intro to Embeddings and Semantic Search 2026?

January 9, 2026January 9, 2026

Keyword search fails when people don’t use the same exact words that are present in your data. Intro to Embeddings and semantic search solve this problem by converting text (and other data) into vectors so “conceptually related” pieces of content can be retrieved even if the words are different.

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What are embeddings?

Embeddings are numerical vector representations of data typically text, but also images, items, or users such that the ones with similar features are nearest neighbors in the high, dimensional space.
Consider a text embedding model mapping: customer left because of bad support user churned after a poor service experience to nearby vectors because they convey similar meaning although the words differ.
Such vectors make it possible to perform mathematical operations such as similarity search (cosine similarity, dot product) for discovering related materials. What is semantic search?

Semantic search leverages embeddings to fetch results based on meaning instead of exact keyword matches:

Step 1: Transform the user query into an embedding vector.
Step 2: Compare it to embeddings of documents, FAQs, tickets, products, etc.
Step 3: Return the items with the highest similarity scores.

Hence, the query refund after shipping damage matches documents that talk about returns for defective items even if the word refund does not appear.

Where embeddings show up in real systems You can give a few intuitive applications: Knowledge bases and support search support agents and customers get better results when they search FAQs, document, and past tickets; they do not have to guess the exact keywords.
Product and content recommendations Represent users and items in the same embedding space; recommend items whose vectors are close to a user’s interaction history.
RAG and GenAI apps before answering a question, a system retrieves semantically relevant context using embeddings, then passes that context to a generative model.
To make the content accessible to beginners, highlight that embeddings are a fundamental component: they themselves do not answer questions but enable search, recommendations, and RAG workflows.