A few months ago, I was building a documentation site for an internal tool. Users kept asking for a search that "understands" — you know, like typing "How do I reset my password?" and getting the right help article, even if the article title didn't contain the word "reset."
I thought: this is 2024, everyone's doing AI. How hard could it be?
Famous last words.
The Problem
I started with a simple keyword search. ElasticSearch, fuzzy matching, the works. It worked okay for exact terms but failed on paraphrasing. Someone would ask "I can't log in" and the search would return nothing because the article said "authentication failure."
