Embeddings

Meaning, written down as coordinates

An embedding turns a piece of text into a list of numbers positioned so that things meaning similar things end up near each other. That is the whole trick, and everything called “semantic search” rests on it.

Because position encodes meaning rather than spelling, refund policy and money back rules land close together despite sharing no words — which is exactly what keyword search cannot do.

The same property is the weakness. A typo in an error code barely moves the point, so an embedding cannot reliably tell ERR_4021 from ERR_4201. Identifiers, version numbers and part codes are where embeddings quietly fail, and why concept 8 exists.