Search RAG - Ingestion
How ingestion silently decides retrieval quality through metadata, duplication, freshness, permissions, and provenance.
Article Map
Search RAG lifecycle
Search RAG Articles
Practical notes on search-based RAG systems.
A focused reading list on ingestion, retrieval, generation, permissions, storage, and quality evaluation for production RAG systems.
Search RAG - Ingestion - Chunking
Why chunking is evidence design: semantic boundaries, citable context, and the failure cost of over- or under-chunking.
Search RAG - Ingestion - Data Enrichment
Where enrichment helps retrieval, where synthetic metadata starts lying, and why source text must remain the evidence.
Search RAG - Ingestion - Storage
Why storage must preserve traceability, deletion semantics, permissions, and version history before retrieval can be trusted.
Search RAG - Ingestion - Permission Handling
Why permissions must shape retrieval itself: ACL propagation, tenant boundaries, source permissions, and safe indexing rules.
Search RAG - Retrieval
Why retrieval is where RAG systems fail silently, long before the model writes the wrong but convincing answer.
Search RAG - Query Understanding
How query rewriting breaks when acronyms, tenants, time, and referents drift away from the user's actual intent.
Search RAG - Hybrid Retrieval
Why hybrid retrieval is not a checkbox: lexical and vector signals fail differently, and fusion decides which failure wins.
Search RAG - Reranking and Output
Why reranking must produce a traceable evidence contract, not just a prettier top-k list for the model.
Search RAG - Generation
Why generation is rarely the root cause: weak evidence gets amplified into confident, correct-looking wrong answers.
Search RAG - Context Design
How context packing fails when metadata, citations, and evidence priority are not visible inside the model contract.
Search RAG - Grounding and Uncertainty
Why grounding is mostly refusal discipline: unsupported claims, conflicts, and ambiguity must survive the final answer.
Search RAG - Model Selection for Generation
Why the best prose model is not always the best RAG model when citations, contracts, latency, and repair rate matter.
Search RAG - Generation Evaluation
How to measure evidence usage, unsupported claims, answer stability, context efficiency, and production generation health.
Search RAG - Quality Evaluation
Why output-only evaluation is debugging blind: retrieval traces, evidence quality, permissions, and regressions matter first.
Search RAG - Metrics and Observability
The observability that matters when answers look stable but evidence coverage, unsupported claims, or permissions are drifting.
Search RAG - Regression Monitoring
How to detect whether model, prompt, retrieval, reranking, or ingestion changes improved the system or silently degraded it.
Search RAG - Human Oversight and Stress Testing
Why human review only pays off when reviewer findings become stress tests, regression cases, and trace-level labels.
Search RAG - Layer-Specific Evaluation
How to stop tuning prompts for failures that actually came from chunking, retrieval, reranking, or missing evidence.