Query Expansion
Also called Query Enrichment
Quietly adding synonyms and related terms to a search so it catches documents worded differently.
Think of it like
Asking for "soda" and having the waiter also check for "pop" and "fizzy drink".
Example
A search for "laptop won’t charge" is expanded with "battery", "power adapter", "not powering on" to widen the net.
How it actually works
Query expansion augments the original query with extra terms — from synonyms, related searches, or an LLM — to improve recall when the corpus uses different vocabulary. It helps sparse methods most, since those depend on exact overlap. The risk is drift: add too many loosely related terms and you dredge up irrelevant results, hurting precision.
For product teams
Catches answers users would otherwise miss due to wording, at some risk of noisier results.
For engineers
Augment the query with synonyms/related terms (thesaurus, PRF, or LLM-generated); raises recall, can dent precision.
Related
- Query Rewriting — A cousin of query rewriting.
- Retrieval — Boosts recall before retrieval.
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