HNSW for Vector Search Explained and Implemented with Faiss (Python)
Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs are among the top-performing indexes for vector similarity search. HNSW is a hugely popular technology that time and time again produces state-of-the-art performance with super-fast search speeds and flawless recall — HNSW is not to be missed.

Despite being a popular and robust algorithm for approximate nearest neighbors (ANN) searches, understanding how it works is far from easy.

This video helps demystify HNSW and explains this intelligent algorithm in an easy-to-understand way. Towards the end of the video, we'll look at how to implement HNSW using Faiss and which parameter settings give us the performance we need.

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00:00 Intro
00:41 Foundations of HNSW
08:41 How HNSW Works
16:38 The Basics of HNSW in Faiss
21:40 How Faiss Builds an HNSW Graph
26.49 Building the Best HNSW Index
33:33 Fine-tuning HNSW
34:30 Outro