The Practitioner's LLM Curriculum ← Week 6 · Hybrid Search Explorer
Interactive · Week 6 · Section 2

Where BM25 wins, where dense wins, where you need both.

The same 60-chunk corpus from Week 5, retrieved three ways: pure BM25 lexical search, pure dense embedding search, and hybrid fusion. Pick a query and see how the rankings differ. Some queries reward exact matches (BM25 wins), some reward semantic generalization (dense wins), and most production queries — the messy mixed kind — reward the fusion of both. The fusion mode toggles between weighted sum and Reciprocal Rank Fusion.

Query
α (fusion weight) 0.50
0 · pure dense 1 · pure BM25
Fusion method

Three retrievers, side by side

top-5 from each method
BM25 lexical · k1=1.5, b=0.75
Hybrid α=0.50 · weighted sum
Dense semantic · cosine

Hybrid top-5 · score breakdown

how each chunk scored on each method

What's happening here