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AImpact
IT EN
Infrastructure Advanced Also known as: Hierarchical Navigable Small World

HNSW

/aitch-en-es-double-you/

A hierarchical graph data structure used to approximately find the nearest vectors to a query in datasets of millions or billions of embeddings.

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In practice

It is the default indexing algorithm in Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, pgvector, and FAISS. It enables millisecond searches at scales where brute force would be unusable. You pay in RAM and index build time.

Related terms

Vector database Embedding Cosine similarity

Seen in the wild

0 entries mentioning it

No archive entry mentions it explicitly. Appears in broader contexts.

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