Technical GlossaryData Engineering and AI Infrastructure

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

TR: Yaklaşık En Yakın Komşu Arama

In One Line

A search approach in high-dimensional vector spaces that prioritizes speed and acceptable proximity over exactness.

Approximate nearest neighbor search is used to search efficiently across millions or billions of embeddings. Since finding the exact nearest neighbor can be computationally expensive, ANN methods return very close matches at much lower cost. This approach forms the performance foundation of modern vector databases. It requires careful engineering trade-offs between retrieval quality and latency.