Frontier of Search

A year-by-year index of what counts as the leading edge of search and retrieval. Each page captures the dominant fronts of its period, so the “frontier” stays anchored in time rather than drifting.

By Year

• Frontier of Search 2025 — late interaction goes multimodal & production-scale (ColPali), embeddings become a commodity, vector quantization/ANN engineering, the keyword-efficiency renaissance (Block-Max WAND), and the first RL/agentic seeds (Search-R1).
• Frontier of Search 2026 — two shifts at once: (1) agents become the user of search — agentic query workload, purpose-built agentic models, Direct Corpus Interaction, RL-Trained Search Agents, Reasoning Reranking; and (2) the frontier becomes commodity — mainstream engines absorb yesterday’s research as switch-on features (ColPali in Elasticsearch, BBQ, learned sparse, built-in rerankers).

The Through-Line

The frontier moves in two directions. It moves up the stack: 2025 made the neural retrieval substrate cheap, multimodal, and scalable; 2026 put an agent on top of it as the primary consumer. But it also moves outward and downward — each year’s research edge descends into mainstream engines as a default feature, so the population that can use it grows by an order of magnitude. The headline (agents) and the quiet majority story (commoditization) are both the frontier.

Related

• How to Start a Career in Search — uses this index as the “monitor where the frontier is” step: read the period pages like a trend report and diff year over year.

Add Frontier of Search 2027 here when the next period page is created.