Top Use Cases for Text, Vector, and Hybrid Search

Search is how we discover new things. Whether you’re looking for a pair of new shoes, the latest medical advice, or insights into corporate data, search provides the means to unlock the truth. Search habits—and the accompanying end-user expectations—have evolved along with changes to the search experiences offered by consumer apps like Google and Amazon. The days of the standard of 10 blue links may well be behind us, as new paradigms like vector search and generative AI (gen AI) have upended long-held search norms.

But are all forms of search created equal, or should we be seeking out the right “flavor” of search for specific jobs?

In this blog post, we will define and dig into various flavors of search, including text, vector and AI-powered search, and hybrid search, and discuss when to use each, including sample use cases where one type of search might be superior to others.

Information retrieval revolutionized with text search

The concept of text search has been baked into user behavior from the early days of the web, with the rudimentary text box entry and 10 blue link results based on text relevance to the initial query. This behavior and associated business model has produced trillions in revenue and has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds across the internet.

Text search allows users to quickly find specific information within a large set of data by entering keywords or phrases. When a query is entered, the text search engine scans through indexed documents to locate and retrieve the most relevant results based on the keywords. Text search is a good solution for queries requiring exact matches where the overarching meaning isn't as critical. Some of the most common uses include:

• Catalog and content search: Using the search bar to find specific products or content based on keywords from customer inquiries. For example, a customer searching for "size 10 men trainers" or “installation guide” can instantly find the exact items they’re looking for, like how Nextar tapped into Atlas Search to enable physical retailers to create online catalogs Covid-19 pandemic.

• In-application search: This is well-suited for organizations with straightforward offerings to make it easier for users to locate key resources, but that don’t require advanced features like semantic retrieval or contextual re-ranking. For instance, if a user searches for "songs key of G," they can quickly receive relevant materials. This streamlines asset retrieval, allowing users to focus on the task they are trying to achieve and boosts overall satisfaction. For a company like Yousician, Atlas Search enabled their 20 million monthly active users to tackle their music lessons with ease.

• Customer 360: Unifying data from different sources to create a single, holistic view. Consolidated information such as user preferences, purchase history, and interaction data can be used to enhance business visibility and simplify the management, retrieval, and aggregation of user data. Consider a support agent searching for all information related to customer “John Doe." They can quickly access relevant attributes and interaction history, ensuring more accurate and efficient service. Helvetia was able to achieve success after migrating to MongoDB and using Atlas Search to deliver a single, 360-degree real-time view across all customer touchpoints and insurance products.

AI and a new paradigm with vector search

With advances in technology, vector search has emerged to help solve the challenge of providing relevant results even when the user may not know what they’re looking for. Vector search allows you to take any type of media or content, convert it into a vector using machine learning algorithms, and then search to find results similar to the target term. The similarity aspect is determined by converting your data into numerical high-dimensional vectors, and then calculating the distance between them to determine relevance—the closer the vector, the higher the relevance.

There is a wide range of practical, powerful use cases powered by vector search—notably semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for gen AI.

Semantic search focuses on meaning and prioritizes user intent by deciphering not just what users type but why they're searching, in order to provide more accurate and context-oriented search results. Some examples of semantic search include:

• Content/knowledge base search: Vast amounts of organizational data, structured and unstructured, with hidden insights, can benefit significantly from semantic search. Questions like “What’s our remote work policy?” can return accurate results even when the source materials do not contain the “remote” keyword, but rather have “return to office” or “hybrid” or other keywords. A real-world example of content search is the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, which uses Atlas Vector Search to power semantic search across petabytes of text, audio, and visual content in its collections.

• Recommendation engines: Understanding users’ interests and intent is a strong competitive advantage–like how Netflix provides a personalized selection of shows and movies based on your watch history, or how Amazon recommends products based on your purchase history. This is particularly powerful in e-commerce, media & entertainment, financial services, and product/service-oriented industries where the customer experience tightly influences the bottom line. A success story is Delivery Hero, which leverages vector search-powered real-time recommendations to increase customer satisfaction and revenue.

• Anomaly detection: Identifying and preventing fraud, security breaches, and other system anomalies is paramount for all organizations. By grouping similar vectors and using vector search to identify outliers, potential threats can be detected early, enabling timely responses. Companies like VISO TRUST and Extrac are among the innovators that build their core offerings using semantic search for security and risk management.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), vector search is increasingly becoming essential in gen AI application development. It augments LLMs by providing domain-specific context outside of what the LLMs “know,” ensuring relevance and accuracy of the gen AI output. In this case, the semantic search outputs are used to enhance RAG. By providing relevant information from a vector database, vector search helps the RAG model generate responses that are more contextually relevant. By grounding the generated text in factual information, vector search helps reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy of the response.

Some common RAG applications are for chatbots and virtual assistants, which provide users with relevant responses and carry out tasks based on the user query, delivering enhanced user experience. Two real-world examples of such chatbot implementations are from our customers Okta and Kovai. Another popular application is using RAG to help generate content like articles, blog posts, scripts, code, and more, based on user prompts or data. This significantly accelerates content production, allowing organizations including Novo Nordisk and Scalestack to save time and produce content at scale, all at an accuracy level that was not possible without RAG.

Beyond RAG, an emerging vector search usage is in agentic systems. Such a system is an architecture encompassing one or more AI agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities, able to access and use various system components and resources to achieve defined objectives while adapting to environmental feedback. Vector search enables efficient and semantically meaningful information retrieval in these systems, facilitating relevant context for LLMs, optimized tool selection, semantic understanding, and improved relevance ranking.

Hybrid search: The best of both worlds

Hybrid search combines the strengths of text search with the advanced capabilities of vector search to deliver more accurate and relevant search results. Hybrid search shines in scenarios where there's a need for both precision (where text search excels) and recall (where vector search excels), and where user queries can vary from simple to complex, including both keyword and natural language queries.

Hybrid search delivers a more comprehensive, flexible information retrieval process, helping RAG models access a wider range of relevant information. For example, in a customer support context, hybrid search can ensure that the RAG model retrieves not only documents containing exact keywords but also semantically similar content, resulting in more informative and helpful responses. Hybrid search can also help reduce information overload by prioritizing the most relevant results. This allows RAG models to focus on processing and understanding the most critical information, leading to faster, more accurate responses, and improving the user experience.

Powering your AI and search applications with MongoDB

As your organization continues to innovate in the rapidly evolving technology ecosystem, building robust AI and search applications supporting customer, employee, and stakeholder experiences can deliver powerful competitive advantages.

With MongoDB, you can efficiently deploy full-text search, vector search, and hybrid search capabilities. Start building today—simplify your developer experience while increasing impact in MongoDB’s fully-managed, secure vector database, integrated with a vast AI partner ecosystem, including all major cloud providers, generative AI model providers, and system integrators.