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Market briefDT-2026-0187

Hybrid search became the default, quietly

Pure dense retrieval is now the exception in production systems.

5 minBig Data & Vector DBs

Keyword matching never stopped being useful for names, identifiers and rare terms — exactly the queries where embeddings are weakest. Most serious deployments now run both and fuse the rankings.

The interesting variation is in fusion weight. Static weights underperform query-dependent ones by a wide margin on mixed workloads, and almost nobody tunes them.

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