Hybrid search in Manticore Search

Search is rarely a one-size-fits-all problem. A user typing "cheap running shoes" wants exact keyword matches, but a user asking "comfortable footwear for jogging" is expressing the same intent in different words. Traditional full-text search handles the first case well. Vector search handles the second. Hybrid search combines both in a single query so you don't have to choose. In modern search systems, this is often described as combining lexical (sparse) retrieval with semantic (dense) retrieval. Different terms, same idea: exact matching plus meaning. What is hybrid search? Hybrid search runs a full-text (BM25) search and a vector (KNN) search side by side, then merges the two result lists into one. Documents that score well on either signal (or both) rise to the top. Full-text search is great at exact keywords, rare terms, and identifiers. Vector search understands meaning — that "automobile" and "car" are the same concept — because their embeddings are nearby in vector space. Each