AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is index refresh?
Index refresh (also called Incremental indexing): Updating a search index so it reflects changes in the source data: new, edited or deleted documents. Stale indexes cause outdated answers, so systems schedule refreshes or stream updates, and track document versions.
Index refresh: an example
A nightly job compares file hashes and re-embeds only the 40 documents that changed that day.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Ingestion pipeline
- Inverted index
- IVF
- Knowledge base
- Knowledge graph
- Late interaction
- Layout-aware parsing
- Learned sparse retrieval
Where you learn it
Index refresh is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.