Why Your Agent's Search Results Look Right and Are Wrong: The Index Distribution Problem
You've built an agent. It has a search tool. You query it with something reasonable — a factual question, a comparison, a technical lookup — and it returns results. The results look right. The sources are real. The snippets are plausible. The agent synthesizes them into a confident answer.
And the answer is wrong. Not obviously wrong. Not hallucinated-in-a-hallucinatory-way wrong. Structurally wrong — wrong in a way that passes every surface-level check because the error is baked into the retrieval layer before the model ever sees the context.
This isn't a prompt engineering problem. It isn't a context window problem. It's a distribution problem, and it has a structural ceiling that no amount of better prompting will fix.
The Index Is a Frozen Decision
