Writing· Search series
Rerankers
Retrieve fast and roughly, then read the top few closely and reorder. The second pass that fixes the first.
The closing part of the search series. First-stage retrieval is fast but ranks crudely. A reranker takes the top candidates and scores each one by reading the query and document together with a cross-encoder, then reorders. This covers the bi-encoder vs cross-encoder split, why it must be a second stage, and where it lives in production, with an interactive retrieve-then-rerank demo.
- Search
