Tagged hybrid search · show all articles
Retrieval-augmented generation is usually described as one step: ask, then answer. In production it is six separate stages, each with its own literature, its own failure mode, and its own knob to turn.
Naive, hybrid, graph-augmented, iterative, and agentic retrieval are five distinct engineering systems, not five leaderboard entries. Compared on latency, cost, and failure surface, each wins a different workload — and none of them ranks the others.
A production retrieval system is not one architecture but six coupled engineering decisions — chunking, hybrid weighting, reranking, access control, index freshness, and what gets watched once it is live.
Retrieval-augmented generation is usually dated to one 2020 paper. Its lineage is older: 1990s sparse ranking, retrieve-then-read question answering, dense encoders, and now retrieval that decides for itself when to search again.