How Vector Databases Search: A Practical Guide to IVF, HNSW, PQ & ScaNN
Introduction Most modern applications, from image similarity to RAG systems, depend on fast vector search. Once you embed text, audio, or images into high-dimensional vectors, finding the closest matches turns into an approximate nearest neighbor problem, and that's where vector databases like FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate, and Elasticsearch