reranking

[ ree-RANG-king ]noun

A second sorting step that reorders search results by how well they actually answer the question.

Explanation

Search wide, then sort hard. The top five straight out of a search are often worse than the top twenty sorted back down to five.

Related words

• RAG — Looking things up in your own documents and handing the relevant bits to the AI at the moment you ask, instead of hoping it already knew.
• embedding — A way of turning text into numbers, so a computer can tell which pieces mean roughly the same thing.