Beyond Brute Force: Why HNSW is the Gold Standard for Vector Search
The bottleneck of modern vector retrieval. When working with high-dimensional embedding space-whether serving semantic search, recommendation engines, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines - the fundamental challenge is nearest-neighbor search. Exact nearest-neighbor methods require calculating the vector distance (like Cosine or Euclidean) between a query vector and every single item in