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.