by Amit Shekhar · 7 July 2026
How does Hybrid Search work?
How Hybrid Search works. We will also see why we need it, the two kinds of search it combines, how their results are merged together, and where it is used in real systems like RAG.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guessWhat type of search retrieves documents with the same meaning as a query despite using different words?
Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.
What this article covers
- What is keyword search
- Why keyword search alone is not enough
- What is semantic search
- Why semantic search alone is not enough
- What is Hybrid Search
- How Hybrid Search runs both searches
- How the two result lists are combined
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)
- Weighted score combination and normalization
- Hybrid Search in the real world
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.