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Searching for an exact error code or model number, my RAG system returns five results about something else entirely.
What you'll have at the end
A hybrid retriever that returns the document containing your exact error code or model number in first place, on a real question where a vector-only search ranked generic pages above it.
You need
A RAG pipeline that already embeds each question and retrieves its top matches from a vector index, plus at least one document whose text contains an exact code, number, or identifier a real question might name directly.
Not covered
Reranking the fused list with a cross-encoder for extra precision, and measuring retrieval accuracy across a large batch of questions; this recipe only covers making one exact-term miss disappear by adding a keyword retriever and fusing it with your vector search.
Leans on
Add a reranker so RAG stops burying the right chunk
once the fused list already contains the right chunk but ranks it below noisier ones, and you want a second pass that scores each candidate directly against the question
Your RAG's retrieval hit rate has never been measured
once you want proof this fix improves retrieval across many real questions instead of the one you checked by hand
Checked 15 Aug 2026
Part of the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) cookbook