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# From Vector Search to Better Understanding: How Hybrid RAG Improves Answers, Not Just Matches


- **Date:** Wednesday, Jul 8, 2026
- **Time:** 16:00–18:00 (120 min)
- **Room:** Room R3 (30 Seats)
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe

## Description

Retrieval-Augmented Generation is everywhere, and most teams start with vector search when building out these agents. It works well when the goal is finding relevant text. It struggles when the task shifts to understanding, summarizing, or reasoning across multiple documents. Developers often discover this the hard way when their system retrieves "relevant" chunks but still produces shallow, inconsistent, or even contradictory answers.

This session introduces Hybrid RAG as a practical alternative. We'll walk through how combining vector retrieval with symbolic and keyword-based approaches changes what the model can actually do. You'll see why Hybrid RAG performs better for synthesis-heavy tasks, how it reduces failure modes common in embedding-only pipelines, and how to implement it in practice. The talk includes multiple live demos that show the differences side by side, using open-source code you can adapt to your own solutions.

## Speaker

### [David vonThenen](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@david-vonthenen)

Senior AI/ML Engineer at NetApp


## Related talks at this congress

- [Scaling GraphRAG: Efficient Knowledge Retrieval for AI](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1005-scaling-graphrag) — Gal Shubeli
- [The R in RAG: Why retrieval is often the weakest link (and how to fix it)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/976-the-r-in-rag-why) — Tomek Porożyński
- [The Retrieval Layer in Context Engineering: From Intuition to Implementation](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1353-the-retrieval-layer) — Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya
- [OLAP for AI Applications and why you should care](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1245-olap-for-ai) — Andrey Abramov