Retrieval
The step where a system finds and selects the documents or passages it will use to answer.
What it means
Retrieval is the search step inside an AI answer. The system takes your question, finds candidate documents or passages, ranks them, and passes the best ones to the language model. Many quality problems start here. If the wrong pages are retrieved, the model can write a fluent answer that is still wrong.
Good retrieval depends on the index, the ranking and the number of sources considered. A system that reads more pages can catch more material, but it also takes longer and may include weaker sources. A narrow search can miss the one page that answers your question, which is why the quality of retrieval often decides whether an answer is useful. For research, check whether the tool reports which pages it retrieved, not just the final answer. Related terms are grounding, query fan-out and citation.
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https://bestaisearchengine.com/glossary/retrieval/