I learned this the hard way on a book platform I'm working on. While semantic search is useful for discovery, we found that prioritizing exact matches is critical. It seems users get pretty frustrated if they type a specific title and get a list of conceptually similar results instead of the actual book. We ended up having to tune the ranking to heavily favor literal string matches over the vector distance to keep people from bouncing.

everything you are saying rings perfectly true to me but there's an additional problem I encounter. (i'm going to make up my example because i'm lazy to check but you'll get the idea) say you want to look up "Alexander the Great"...

...God help you if Brad Pitt and or the Jonas Brothers ever played a role with exactly that name-match. The web and search (and the culture?) have become super biased toward video especially commercial offerings, and the sorting ranked by popularity means pages and pages of virtually identical content about that which you are not interested in.

why did you have to learn this the hard way?