01
Where this one gets misread
Hybrid search is a merge, and the merge weighting decides the results. Vendors describe the two signals readily and the weighting rarely, which is the part that was tuned on somebody else's corpus.
Glossary
What is hybrid search?
Hybrid search combines more than one retrieval signal, usually keyword matching alongside semantic similarity, then merges the results into a single ranking.
Updated 21 Aug 2026
02
Questions to ask
Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.
- Which signals, and how are the scores combined?
- Was the weighting tuned on your material or theirs?
- Can you see each signal's contribution to a result?
- What happens when the two disagree?
03
How Marella uses the term
We use “Hybrid search” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.
- Backed by a product mechanism or an evaluation method
- Deployment differences flagged
What this page does not prove
- B1A definition is not a claim about how the product performs.
- B2Vendor implementations vary.
- B3Test the term against a representative workflow.
Related pages
Test the claim on your documents
Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.