---
title: Search approaches
description: To deliver relevant search results, you need to choose the right search approach for your data and use case. The following table provides an overview...
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/search-approaches
products:
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
  - Elastic Stack
  - Elasticsearch
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# Search approaches
To deliver relevant search results, you need to choose the right search approach for your data and use case.

## Overview of search techniques

The following table provides an overview of the fundamental search techniques available in Elasticsearch:

| Name                                                                                                                   | Description                                                                               | Use when                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| [**Full-text search**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/full-text)               | Traditional lexical search with analyzers and relevance tuning                            | Exact words and phrases in the query should match the index. You want fast keyword matching without ML setup.                                                                                                                                          |
| [**Semantic search for text**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/semantic-search) | Search based on meaning and intent, not just keywords. A use case of vector search.       | Queries use everyday language or synonyms instead of exact index terms. Get started with the managed [`semantic_text`](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/semantic-search/semantic-search-semantic-text) workflow. |
| [**Multimodal search**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/multimodal-search)      | Meaning-based search across text, images, audio, video, and documents in one vector space | You need cross-modal retrieval, such as text-to-image search. Start with the [multimodal search tutorial](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/multimodal-search/multimodal-search-tutorial).                        |
| [**Vector search**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/vector)                     | Similarity search using vector embeddings stored in vector fields                         | You bring your own embeddings or need direct control over vector fields and models.                                                                                                                                                                    |
| [**Hybrid search**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/hybrid-search)              | Combines full-text and vector search in one request                                       | You need exact keyword matches and meaning based matches in one result set.                                                                                                                                                                            |
| [**Ranking and reranking**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/ranking)            | Post-processing results to improve relevance                                              | First stage retrieval is good enough but top results need finer ordering.                                                                                                                                                                              |
| [**Geospatial search**](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/explore-analyze/geospatial-analysis)     | Location-based search and spatial relationships                                           | Results depend on location, distance, or regions on a map.                                                                                                                                                                                             |

<tip>
  Full-text search is a very powerful tool in itself. One of the key strengths of Elasticsearch is its flexibility, allowing you to start with full-text search and gradually incorporate more complex or resource-intensive approaches over time.
</tip>


## Next step

Once you've chosen your search approach(es), you'll need to select a query language to implement them. Refer to [query languages for search use cases](https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3804/solutions/search/querying-for-search) to learn about the available options.