Glossary · AI & ML

Semantic Search

Search that understands the meaning and intent behind queries rather than just matching keywords.

Semantic search is an information retrieval technique that goes beyond keyword matching to understand the meaning, intent, and context of a query. Instead of looking for exact word matches, semantic search uses embeddings and natural language understanding to find results that are conceptually relevant. For example, searching for "staff turnover" would also find documents about "employee attrition" or "workforce churn." Semantic search is powered by embedding models that convert both queries and documents into vector representations, then finds the closest matches in vector space. It is widely used in enterprise search, e-commerce, knowledge bases, and AI-powered database interfaces.

Fig — every answer ships with the tables, rows and SQL behind it.