Mastery: connect the pieces

1. Idea — Keyword and vector search catch different misses. Hybrid fusion ranks candidates from both before generation.…
2. Mechanism — Run lexical and dense retrieval, fuse scores (e.g., RRF), optional rerank, then pack evidence for the LLM.…
3. Controls — lexical weight, vector weight, RRF k, candidate pools, reranker depth, filters
4. Tradeoff — Hybrid raises recall and latency/complexity. Heavy lexical weight helps IDs and hurts paraphrase. Rerankers improve order and cost milliseconds.…
5. Failures — ID miss; Fusion drowning
6. Metrics — recall@5, MRR, p95 latency, ID-slice recall, citation support
7. Ship rule — Ship RRF hybrid with code-preserving analyzer after recall@5 ≥ 0.85 on 50 labeled tickets.

Neighboring layers (retrieval, serving, policy, human review) still own what hybrid search cannot on the technical support search assistant. Do not ask this chapter’s dial to replace permissions or source truth.

Mastery is transfer: take hybrid search into a second scenario that is not the technical support search assistant and rebuild the checklist without copying sentences. If you can only recite this chapter’s examples for hybrid search, you have memorized a story, not a model.

Also pin one numeric memory from this hybrid search chapter: On 50 tickets, pure vector recall@5=0.72, pure BM25=0.64, RRF hybrid=0.86—report denominators. That number is not decoration; it is a template for how claims about hybrid search on the technical support search assistant should look in design docs. Scoped specifically to hybrid search / technical support search assistant / mastery-connect.

People confuse hybrid search with neighboring buzzwords when debugging the technical support search assistant. Before changing prompts, ask whether the broken stage was evidence gathering, the hybrid search judgment itself, validation, or the product action. Fixing the wrong stage creates folklore (“we tried hybrid search and it failed”) that blocks the next team on the technical support search assistant. Scoped specifically to hybrid search / technical support search assistant / mastery-connect.

Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to hybrid search rag rather than generic AI advice.

Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to hybrid search rag rather than generic AI advice.