Searching through data for similar items is a common operation in databases, search engines, and many other applications. Finding similar items based on fixed numeric criteria is very straightforward using a query language when we are dealing with traditional databases. For example, finding employees in a database within a fixed salary range.
But sometimes we have to answer questions like “Which objects in our inventory are similar to what a user searched for?” The search terms can be vague and can have a lot of variations. For example, a user can search for something generic like “shoes”,“black shoes” or something more precise like “Nike AF-1 LV8”.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.pinecone.io/learn/what-is-similarity-search/