# Reranking

Concept · [Building with AI](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/ai)

Also called: reranker, re-ranking, re-ranker, rerank, cross-encoder

A second pass in search where a more careful model reorders the first batch of results by how well each actually answers the question.

**For example:** A search pulls the 50 closest passages, a reranker picks the best 5 and only those go to the [LLM](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/llm).

## Connects to (4)

- [RAG](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/rag): Retrieval-augmented generation.
- [Similarity search](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/similarity-search): Finding the stored items whose vectors are closest to a query's vector, so results match by meaning rather than exact words.
- [Hybrid search](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/hybrid-search): Combining keyword search and similarity search, so results match both exact terms, such as product codes, and overall meaning.
- [Chunking](https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/chunking): Splitting long documents into smaller passages before creating embeddings, so a search can return just the relevant part instead of a…

Map view: https://ecosystem.samcarlton.com/reranking