Search and Retrieval: Index
| From Machine Learning | |
| Search and Retrieval | |
|---|---|
| Page metadata | |
| First created | May 30, 2026 |
| Last edited | May 31, 2026 |
Working notes building up the mental model for modern search and retrieval systems from zero. One concept per page. Written in the order I had to learn them to make sense of a production hybrid-retrieval stack.
Index
- What Search Is. Starting from grep and working up to the shape of meaning-based retrieval. The distributional hypothesis, why exact-match breaks, and the basic structure every modern retrieval system inherits.
- Counting Words Smarter: TF, Length Normalization, and IDF. Building lexical retrieval up from raw word-overlap to the three ideas that make it actually work: term frequency, document-length normalization, and inverse document frequency.
