AI
How Vector Databases Search: A Practical Guide to IVF, HNSW, PQ & ScaNN
Introduction Modern applications-from image similarity to RAG systems-run on fast vector search. When you embed text, audio, or images into high‑dimensional vectors, finding the closest matches becomes a problem of approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. This is where vector databases like FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate, and Elasticsearch step in.