Topic 5: Beyond Similarity
11 min read·21 Sept 2026
Intuition: similarity says "this card talks about your question". It doesn't say whether the card is current, official, trusted, allowed, or right for this user. Those signals come from metadata and business rules.
Where signals are applied: after retrieval and fusion (on the candidate list), as a small adjustment to relevance, not a replacement for it. Keep every part of the score so you can explain each ranking.