Vector Search in Elasticsearch: From Keywords to Meaning - Building Semantic Search and RAG Pipelines

You type "k8s deployment troubleshooting" into your documentation search. The top result is a page about Kubernetes architecture that never mentions the word "troubleshooting." It is exactly what you need. BM25 would have missed it entirely. This is the promise of vector search: finding documents by meaning, not just matching words. In 2025 and 2026, vector search has moved from niche ML engineering to a core Elasticsearch capability. If you are building search for AI applications - RAG pipelines, semantic Q&A, recommendation systems - understanding how Elasticsearch handles vectors is no longer optional. I have spent the past year building RAG pipelines at Cloudera, and I have learned that vector search is powerful but easy to misuse. This post covers what works, what does not, and how to implement it in production. Why Vector Search Matters (And When It Does Not) BM25, which we covered in a previous post, is brilliant at matching exact terms. But it is fundamentally lexical. It does not understand that: "k8s" and "kubernetes" are the same thing "docker container" and "containerization" are related concepts "out of memory error" and "heap exhaustion" describe the same problem Vector search solves this by converting text into high-dimensional numerical vectors (embeddings) where semantically similar content lives close together in vector space. A query for "k8s deployment troubleshooting" gets embedded into a vector, and Elasticsearch finds the nearest document vectors - even if they do not share a single keyword. But vector search is not a replacement for BM25. It is a complement. BM25 is faster, requires no ML infrastructure, and excels at exact-term matching. Vector search is slower, requires embedding models, and shines at conceptual similarity. The best search systems in 2026 use both. How Elasticsearch Stores and Indexes Vectors Elasticsearch introduced the dense_vector field type in version 7.x and has dramatically improved it through 8.x and into 2026. Here