Why Superlinked?
Your queries are changing
The landscape of search and information retrieval is rapidly evolving. With the rise of AI and large language models, user expectations for search capabilities have skyrocketed. Your users now expect that your search can handle complex, nuanced queries that go beyond simple keyword matching.
We saw 2x more keywords search 6 months after the ChatGPT launch. Algolia CTO, 2023 | 120B searches/month ! 17,000 customers
This trend isn't isolated. Across industries, we're seeing a shift towards more sophisticated search queries that blend multiple concepts, contexts, and data types.
Vector Search with text-only embeddings (& also multi-modal) fails on complex queries, because complex queries are never just about text. They involve other data too!
Consider these examples:
E-commerce: A query like "comfortable running shoes for marathon training under $150" involves text, numerical data (price), and categorical information (product type, use case).
Content platforms: "Popular science fiction movies from the 80s with strong female leads" combines text analysis, temporal data, and popularity metrics.
Job search: "Entry-level data science positions in tech startups with good work-life balance" requires understanding of text, categorical data (industry, job level), and even subjective metrics.
Enter Superlinked
This is where Superlinked comes in, offering a powerful, flexible framework designed to handle the complexities of modern search and information retrieval challenges. Superlinked is a vector embedding solution for AI teams working with complicated data within their RAG, Search, Recommendations and Analytics stack.
Let's quickly go through an example. Keep in mind that there are a ton of new concepts thrown at you, but this is just to illustrate how Superlinked 'looks'. We'll go over each concept in detail in the following sections.
Imagine you are building a system that can deal with a query like “recent news about crop yield”
. After collecting your data, you define your schema, ingest data and build index like this:
Schema definition
Encoder definition
Define Indexes
You define your queries and parameterize them like this:
Query definition
Debug in notebook, run as server
Handle natural language queries
Discover the powerful capabilities Superlinked offers here.
But can't I put all my data in json, stringify it and embed using LLM?
Stringify and embed approach produces unpredictable results. For example (code below):
Embed 0..100 with OpenAI API
Calculate and plot the cosine similarity
Observe the difference between expected and actual results
Okay, But can't I ...
Use different already existing storages per attribute, fire multiple searches and then reconcile results?
Our naive approach (above) - storing and searching attribute vectors separately, then combining results - is limited in ability, subtlety, and efficiency when we need to retrieve objects with multiple simultaneous attributes. Moreover, multiple kNN searches take more time than a single search with concatenated vectors.
It's better to store all your attribute vectors in the same vector store and perform a single search, weighting your attributes at query time.
Read more here: Multi-attribute search with vector embeddings
Use Metadata filters or Candidate re-ranking
When you convert a fuzzy preference like “recent”, “risky” or “popular” into a filter, you model a sigmoid with a binary step function = not enough resolution.
Semantic ranking & ColBERT only use text, learn2rank models need ML Engineers. Broad queries eg “popular pants” can’t be handled by re-ranking at all, due to poor candidate recall.
Okay, seems like Superlinked proposes a nice approach, but
How can I build with it at scale?
Superlinked Server offers a streamlined deployment solution for Superlinked projects. With a single script, you can create a Superlinked application featuring REST endpoints and Vector Database integration. This enables quick implementation of advanced search capabilities, allowing you to focus on leveraging Superlinked's features rather than managing infrastructure, from prototype to production.
How does it fit in the big picture?
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