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Beyond Cosine: When Order Beats Angle in Embedding Similarity

Search has a small ritual. Take two embeddings, compute cosine similarity, rank the results, and move on. The ritual is fast, familiar, and usually good enough. It is also so deeply embedded in AI infrastructure that many teams treat it less like a modeling choice and more like plumbing. That is convenient. It is not always innocent. ...

February 7, 2026 · 14 min · Zelina