Synthadoc Adds Semantic Search by Default After Benchmarking Against Keyword Retrieval

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The Synthadoc team investigated whether its keyword-only search should gain vector search after a user request for semantic retrieval. Their benchmark on a 2,000-page wiki showed keyword search accuracy for paraphrased questions falling from 71% at 200 pages to 48%, while exact-name and own-words queries stayed near-perfect. Their existing vector re-ranking mode hurt exact-name lookups, so they tested a fused ranking combined with a rule that preserves BM25's clear top winners. The final hybrid approach raised paraphrase accuracy to 68% and overall accuracy from 84% to 90%, and caching the keyword index made search 18 times faster. Semantic search is now on by default for new wikis, with Chinese, Japanese and Korean content automatically kept on keyword search because the embedding model is English-only.

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