What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?

What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?

From The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

May 5, 2026 · 29 min · Episode 944

About this episode

Ryan discusses semantic search and vector databases with Bryan O’Grady from Qdrant.

Ryan welcomes Bryan O’Grady, Head of Field Research and Solutions Architecture at Qdrant, to discuss the differences between traditional text search engines powered by Lucene and modern vector databases, when vector search’s exact-match needs work for things like logs and security analytics and when semantic search works for user-facing discovery and non-exact results, and how Qdrant is growing into video embeddings and local-agent contexts.  Episode notes:   Qdrant offers high-performance vector search at scale with any deployment model. Connect with Brian on LinkedIn or email the Qdrant team at support@qdrant.io .  Congratulations to user Brad Larson for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Find the tangent of a point on a cubic bezier curve . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

People in this episode

Host: Ryan

Guest: Bryan O’Grady

Topics covered

  • semantic search
  • vector databases
  • text search engines
  • logs
  • security analytics
  • user-facing discovery
  • video embeddings

Keywords

  • semantic search
  • vector databases
  • text search
  • logs
  • security analytics
  • user discovery
  • video embeddings

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Qdrant, Lucene

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