To be honest as someone working in this space for the past two years, the problem with the “RAG” and semantic search community is it’s mostly vendors and solutions people selling simple, general stuff to product teams.

If you really are into search you probably implement something bespoke for your use case and integrate it into a product directly, and engage with models/infra tools directly rather than through the products in the space.

If you understand how “semantic retrieval” and other search tools are implemented in practice they feel almost embarrassingly primitive to give such fancy names, or pay for through tools that just implement really basic post-filtering. The entire space had the rug pulled out from under it once “agentic search” took off and most major LLM vendors started integrating web search and tool calling into their products. There is still a lot more interesting stuff you could do with customized rerankers/embedding models, and search algorithms, or small models specialized for agentic search/retrieval, etc but the userbase is big companies that realistically don’t need anything more than a list of tech support document titles that a cheap LLM can select from. So “RAG” is basically a sales shibboleth for that type of stuff now.