> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.lancedb.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Search

> Comprehensive guide to all search capabilities in LanceDB including vector search, full-text search, hybrid search, and more.

| Feature | Description |
| :- | :- |
| [Vector Search](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/vector-search.md) | Semantic similarity search with multiple distance metrics |
| [Multivector Search](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/multivector-search.md) | Search using multiple vector embeddings per document |
| [Full-Text Search](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/full-text-search.md) | Keyword-based search with BM25 and pre-filtering |
| [Hybrid Search](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/hybrid-search.md) | Combines vector and full-text search with reranking |
| [Filtering](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/filtering.md) | Filter results based on metadata fields |
| [SQL Queries](https://docs.lancedb.com/search/sql/index.md) | SQL query capabilities for data exploration and analytics |

## Before you search

* Vector search can run without an ANN index as an exhaustive scan. That's useful while prototyping, but build a vector index before relying on low-latency searches over larger tables.
* Full-text and hybrid text search require an FTS index on the text column you query. If a table has multiple FTS indexes, specify the target column. FTS also supports phrase, boolean, boosted, multi-match, and fuzzy query forms when you need more than plain terms.
* Phrase FTS queries require an index created with token positions enabled.
* Multivector search currently uses cosine similarity and accepts either one query vector or a matrix of query vectors; every query vector must match the inner dimension of the multivector column.
* Set an explicit `.limit(...)` for production queries. The default top-k is 10 for search builders,
  but spelling it out makes latency and result-count assumptions visible. Query builders also
  support controls such as prefilter/postfilter, distance ranges, row-id inclusion, offset
  pagination, and Arrow/Pandas/list result materialization.


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