Your thinking is mostly correct. Here are some popular examples and their approaches:
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Google Search:
- Approach: Semantic Search
- Explanation: Uses natural language processing to understand the meaning of the query and find relevant documents, even if they don't contain the exact keywords.
- Vector Database: Yes
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Google Image Search:
- Approach: Similarity Search
- Explanation: Finds images similar to the query image by comparing vector representations of images.