Semantic search for Longform Weekly
Meaning-based search across 200,000 documents with filters and permissions. A case study by Arjun Patel, AI Engineer — Chatbots & Document AI.
Challenge
Users of Longform Weekly, an independent magazine, could not find documents unless they remembered exact titles. Keyword search returned too much noise.
Solution
I added hybrid search combining embeddings and BM25, permission-aware filtering, query understanding for dates and authors, and an evaluation harness to tune ranking.