Outpacing Elasticsearch: How Cosdata Rebuilt BM25 for a New Era of Search
Nithin Mani
Founder
·10 min read
The Future of Retrieval is Hybrid — and Fast
What is BM25 and Why Does it Matter for Search?
How We Implemented BM25 for Maximum Performance
Custom Inverted Index for Efficient Lexical Retrieval
Proprietary Key-Value Store for Document ID Mapping
Precomputed BM25 Scoring Components
Minimal Abstraction for Scoring Top-K Results
Benchmarking Cosdata vs. Elasticsearch: Native Speed for Modern AI Retrieval
Methodology
Dataset Categories
Small, Domain-Specific Datasets (< 500k documents)
Large, General NLP Datasets (> 500k documents)
Performance Results
Small Datasets:
Large Datasets:
Why Cosdata Performs Better
Why These Performance Gains Matter
Explore More
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