Vector Search Can't Tell "Yes" From "No"
Akamai Technologies, Tuesday, October 6th, 2026
Akamai explains why vector search gives contradictory statements near-identical scores and how RAG systems can surface conflicts.
Akamai explains that vector search measures similarity, so contradictory statements such as 'the battery is replaceable' and 'the battery is not replaceable' can receive almost identical scores.
Embeddings compress a sentence into a few hundred numbers trained mostly to recognize shared subject matter, and standard RAG techniques like chunking and top-k retrieval can strip context or hide conflicting sources from an AI agent.
The post recommends combining vector search with keyword search, metadata, conflict detection and reranking.