Figure 8.3: The quality funnel of a mature retrieval pipeline
Figure 8.3 The quality funnel of a mature retrieval pipeline. Two complementary
channels—keyword search for exact terms, semantic search for meaning—each cast a wide net over the corpus; their results are fused into a large
candidate set, and only then does the reranker, in accent, judge every candidate
against the query and keep the best few for the prompt. Casting wide is cheap;
the reranker is where the largest single gain in retrieval quality usually
lives.
