> The key idea here is that with Superlinked, your search system can understand what you want and adjust accordingly.

I read as much of this article as I could be bothered to and still didn’t really understand how it removes the need for reranking. It starts talking about mixing vector and non-vector search, so ok fine. Is there any signal here or is it all marketing fluff?

I might not know enough about this subject and think the main idea is to make the initial search retrieval much smarter and more comprehensive, so the results are already good enough, lessening or removing the need for a second, often costly, re-ranking step.

They achieve this with few different ways:

- Unified Multimodal Vectors (Mixing Data Types from the Start)

Instead of just creating a vector from the text description, Superlinked creates a single, richer vector for each item (e.g., a pair of headphones) right when it's indexed. This "multimodal vector" already encodes not just the text's meaning, but also its numerical attributes (like price, rating, battery life) and categorical attributes (like "electronics," "on-ear").

- Dynamic Query-Time Weighting (Telling the Search What Matters Now)

When you make a query, you can tell Superlinked how important each of those "baked-in" aspects of the multimodal vector is for that specific search. For example: "Find affordable wireless headphones under $200 and high ratings" – you can weight the "price" aspect heavily (to favor lower prices), the "rating" aspect heavily, and the "text similarity" to "wireless headphones" also significantly, all within the initial query to the unified vector.

- Hard Filtering Before Vector Search (Cutting Out Irrelevant Items Early)

You apply these hard filters (like price <= 200 or category == "electronics") before the vector similarity search even happens on the remaining items.

If these are implemented well, Superlinked could improve the quality of initial retrieval to a point where a separate re-ranking stage becomes less necessary.

Does this answer your question?