Hybrid search

Hybrid search runs both BM25 and dense vector retrieval in parallel and merges the results, usually with reciprocal rank fusion (RRF). It outperforms either method alone in essentially every benchmark we have measured because the two methods catch different kinds of matches: BM25 wins on exact terms and rare entities, dense wins on semantic similarity and paraphrasing. If you are doing pure vector search in production, switching to hybrid is the easiest meaningful upgrade.