Building a Search System in Practice — Putting It All Together
Knowing how inverted indexes, BM25, and vector search work is one thing; assembling them into a search system that's fast, relevant, and maintainable is another. This closing post is the practical synthesis — the architecture of a real search system, the choices that matter, and the hard-won operational lessons that no algorithm paper mentions. It turns the series into something you can actually build, whether it's a product search box or the retrieval layer of a RAG application.
Knowing the algorithms is one thing; assembling a fast, relevant, maintainable search system is another. The anatomy (offline index / online retrieve-then-rank), the decisions that matter (buy vs build, keyword/semantic/hybrid), continuous relevance measurement, and why the retriever caps a RAG system's quality.