AI EngineeringInterview preparation
Intermediate·Discussion·2 min read

Exact versus approximate search?

Practice this question
  • Exact search examines eligible vectors thoroughly; approximate search trades some nearest-neighbor recall for speed and scale.
  • I benchmark with realistic filters, corpus sizes, and query patterns rather than assuming ANN is always required.
Adapted from 13_AI.MD · “29.5 Vector databases”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.