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An index is a specialized structure that speeds up finding records or similar items without scanning everything. It is useful whenever search or AI retrieval must stay interactive as data grows.
Whilst a new index feels like a finish line, in practice stale or mistuned indexes retrieve confident near-misses. For example, yesterday’s docs are live on the site but absent from the index the assistant queries. We often recommend explicit rebuild/upsert routines and measuring retrieval quality — not only build time.