BM25

March 4, 2026

A deep dive into the Best Matching 25 algorithm for information retrieval.

BM25 (Best Matching 25) is a ranking function used by search engines to estimate the relevance of documents to a given search query.

It is based on probabilistic models and is often considered the state-of-the-art for traditional keyword-based search.

How it works

BM25 improves upon TF-IDF by adding two important parameters: k1 and b.